Effects of aging on mnemonic discrimination of emotional information.

ABSTRACT: Episodic memory loss is one of the hallmarks of age-related cognitive decline and a major symptom of Alzheimer's disease. The persistence and strength of memories is determined by modulatory factors such as emotional arousal. Whether emotional memories are preserved with age or if these memories are just as susceptible to loss and forgetting is not well understood. We have recently shown that emotion alters how similar memories are stored using nonoverlapping representations (i.e., pattern separation) in an emotional mnemonic discrimination task. Here, we extend this work to testing young and older adults at 2 time points (immediately after encoding and 24 hr later). Overall, older adults performed worse than young adults, a memory deficit that was not secondary to perceptual or attentiona

SUBMITTER: Leal SL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4196942 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature