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Anticipatory neural dynamics of spatial-temporal orienting of attention in younger and older adults.

ABSTRACT: Spatial and temporal expectations act synergistically to facilitate visual perception. In the current study, we sought to investigate the anticipatory oscillatory markers of combined spatial-temporal orienting and to test whether these decline with ageing. We examined anticipatory neural dynamics associated with joint spatial-temporal orienting of attention using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in both younger and older adults. Participants performed a cued covert spatial-temporal orienting task requiring the discrimination of a visual target. Cues indicated both where and when targets would appear. In both age groups, valid spatial-temporal cues significantly enhanced perceptual sensitivity and reduced reaction times. In the MEG data, the main effect of spatial orienting was the lateralised anticipatory modulation of posterior alpha and beta oscillations. In contrast to previous reports, this modulation was not attenuated in older adults; instead it was even more pronounced. The main effect of temporal orienting was a bilateral suppression of posterior alpha and beta oscillations. This effect was restricted to younger adults. Our results also revealed a striking interaction between anticipatory spatial and temporal orienting in the gamma-band (60-75?Hz). When considering both age groups separately, this effect was only clearly evident and only survived statistical evaluation in the older adults. Together, these observations provide several new insights into the neural dynamics supporting separate as well as combined effects of spatial and temporal orienting of attention, and suggest that different neural dynamics associated with attentional orienting appear differentially sensitive to ageing.

SUBMITTER: Heideman SG

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6057272 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Anticipatory neural dynamics of spatial-temporal orienting of attention in younger and older adults.

Heideman Simone G SG Rohenkohl Gustavo G Chauvin Joshua J JJ Palmer Clare E CE van Ede Freek F Nobre Anna C AC

NeuroImage 20180504

Spatial and temporal expectations act synergistically to facilitate visual perception. In the current study, we sought to investigate the anticipatory oscillatory markers of combined spatial-temporal orienting and to test whether these decline with ageing. We examined anticipatory neural dynamics associated with joint spatial-temporal orienting of attention using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in both younger and older adults. Participants performed a cued covert spatial-temporal orienting task re ...[more]

PMID: 29733953

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Project description:Age-related memory decline is associated with changes in neural functioning, but little is known about how aging affects the quality of information representation in the brain. Whereas a long-standing hypothesis of the aging literature links cognitive impairments to less distinct neural representations in old age ("neural dedifferentiation"), memory studies have shown that overlapping neural representations of different studied items are beneficial for memory performance. In an electroencephalography (EEG) study, we addressed the question whether distinctiveness or similarity between patterns of neural activity supports memory differentially in younger and older adults. We analyzed between-item neural pattern similarity in 50 younger (19-27 years old) and 63 older (63-75 years old) male and female human adults who repeatedly studied and recalled scene-word associations using a mnemonic imagery strategy. We compared the similarity of spatiotemporal EEG frequency patterns during initial encoding in relation to subsequent recall performance. The within-person association between memory success and pattern similarity differed between age groups: For older adults, better memory performance was linked to higher similarity early in the encoding trials, whereas young adults benefited from lower similarity between earlier and later periods during encoding, which might reflect their better success in forming unique memorable mental images of the joint picture-word pairs. Our results advance the understanding of the representational properties that give rise to subsequent memory, as well as how these properties may change in the course of aging.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Declining memory abilities are one of the most evident limitations for humans when growing older. Despite recent advances of our understanding of how the brain represents and stores information in distributed activation patterns, little is known about how the quality of information representation changes during aging and thus affects memory performance. We investigated how the similarity between neural representations relates to subsequent memory in younger and older adults. We present novel evidence that the interaction of pattern similarity and memory performance differs between age groups: Older adults benefited from higher similarity during early encoding, whereas young adults benefited from lower similarity between early and later encoding. These results provide insights into the nature of memory and age-related memory deficits.

Dataset Information

Anticipatory neural dynamics of spatial-temporal orienting of attention in younger and older adults.

Publications

Anticipatory neural dynamics of spatial-temporal orienting of attention in younger and older adults.

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