Altered Coding of Environmental Boundaries in Human Aging: An fMRI Study.

ABSTRACT: Aging is associated with changes in spatial memory and navigation, yet the mechanisms underlying these changes are not yet fully understood. Environmental boundaries are among the most salient and reliable spatial cues, supporting both spatial memory and orientation. Here, we investigated how aging affects the use and the neural representation of boundary information during a virtual object location memory task. Healthy young and older adults navigated a square virtual environment while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, allowing us to assess moment-to-moment encoding of distance to environmental boundaries in the entorhinal cortex and subiculum. Behaviorally, both age groups showed more accurate memory for objects located near boundaries, but this effect was amplified in ol

SUBMITTER: Segen V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12529463 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature