Journal
NEUROBIOLOGY OF AGING
Volume 29, Issue 6, Pages 945-958Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2006.12.017
Keywords
aging; cognition; socio-economic status (SES); item memory; source memory; recency judgments; recognition judgments; event-related brain potentials (ERPs); frontal negative slow wave
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Funding
- NIA NIH HHS [R01 AG021887, R01 AG009988, AG05213, R01 AG009988-12, AG21887, R01 AG005213-19, R01 AG005213] Funding Source: Medline
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An important goal of aging research is to determine factors leading to individual differences that might compensate for some of the deleterious effects of aging on cognition. To determine whether socio-economic status (SES) plays a role in mitigating age-related decrements in the recollection of contextual details, we categorized older participants into low- and high-SES groups. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were recorded in a picture memory task involving recency and recognition judgments. Young, old-low and old-high SES groups did not differ in recognition performance. However, on recency judgments, old-low subjects performed at chance, whereas old-high subjects did not differ significantly from young adults. Consistent with their preserved recency performance, a long-duration frontal negativity was significantly larger for recency compared to recognition trials in the ERPs of the old-high SES group only. These data suggest that older adults with higher SES levels can use strategies to compensate for the adverse effects of aging in complex source memory tasks by recruiting additional neural resources apparently not required by the young. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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