A Neural Mechanism Underlying Memory Failure in Older Adults

Older adults have reduced memory, primarily for recall, but also for recognition (Craik and McDowd, 1987), particularly for unfamiliar faces (Bartlett et al., 1989). Behavioral studies have shown that age-related memory declines are due in part to distraction from impaired inhibition of task-irrelevant input during encoding (Healey et al., 2008). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to uncover the sources of memory deficits associated with aging. To date, this work has focused on successful encoding, while the neural correlates of unsuccessful encoding are unknown. Here, we provide novel evidence of a neural mechanism underlying memory failures exclusively affecting older adults. Whereas both younger and older adults showed reduced activation of brain regions important for encoding (e. g., hippocampus) during unsuccessful encoding, only older adults showed increased activity in brain regions mediating distraction (e. g., auditory cortex) and in left prefrontal cortex. Further, these regions were functionally connected with medial parietal areas, previously identified as default mode regions (Raichle and Snyder, 2007), which may reflect environmental monitoring. Our results suggest that increased distraction from task-irrelevant input (auditory in this case), associated with the unfamiliar and noisy fMRI environment, may increase environmental monitoring. This in turn could hinder suppression of default mode processing, resulting in memory failures in older adults. These findings provide novel evidence of a brain mechanism underlying the behavioral evidence that impaired inhibition of extraneous input during encoding leads to memory failure in older adults and may have implications for the ubiquitous use of fMRI for investigating neurocognitive aging.