Schedule of Events | Symposia

Age dependent dissociation in recollection-related functional activity in the medial temporal lobe, memory performance, and non-mnemonic cognition

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ambereen Kidwai¹ (amber.kidwai@utdallas.edu), Mingzhu Hou¹, Marianne DeChastelaine¹, Michael D. Rugg¹; ¹University of Texas at Dallas

We contrasted associations between recollection-related functional activity in the entorhinal, perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices with memory performance and offline cognitive performance, in 36 younger (aged 18-29) and 62 cognitively healthy older (aged 63-76) adults. Participants were administered a battery of neuropsychological tests from which 3 cognitive constructs (Memory, Crystalized intelligence and Fluency) were extracted. They also undertook a scanned associative recognition task that allowed estimation of fMRI recollection effects. Using manually-delineated regions of interest (ROIs), we identified robust recollection effects in each MTL region. The effects did not differ between the age groups after controlling for performance on the experimental memory test. Our primary analyses used regression models to identify whether recollection effects in the ROIs were predictive of associative recognition memory or the cognitive construct scores. In the younger adults, MTL recollection effects failed to correlate either with associative recognition performance or the Memory construct. The effects did however demonstrate a robust association with the Fluency construct (r = .503, p < .005, controlling for age), an association that remained after controlling for performance on the other two constructs and the experimental task. In contrast, MTL recollection effects in the older participants correlated positively with associative recognition performance (r = .335, p < .01, controlling for age), but no associations were identified with any cognitive construct. The findings for the older age group are consistent with those reported previously. The findings from the younger group are suggestive of a previously unappreciated role for these regions in non-mnemonic cognition.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging