Age-related differences in prefrontal glutamate are associated with increased working memory decay that gives the appearance of learning deficits.

ABSTRACT: The ability to use past experience to effectively guide decision-making declines in older adulthood. Such declines have been theorized to emerge from either impairments of striatal reinforcement learning systems (RL) or impairments of recurrent networks in prefrontal and parietal cortex that support working memory (WM). Distinguishing between these hypotheses has been challenging because either RL or WM could be used to facilitate successful decision-making in typical laboratory tasks. Here we investigated the neurocomputational correlates of age-related decision-making deficits using an RL-WM task to disentangle these mechanisms, a computational model to quantify them, and magnetic resonance spectroscopy to link them to their molecular bases. Our results reveal that task performance is wo

SUBMITTER: Rmus M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10174689 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature