Centre for Policy on Ageing



Age differences in prefrontal cortical activity in working memory
Author(s)	Bart Rypma, Vivek Prabhakaran, John E Desmond
Journal title	Psychology and Aging, vol 16, no 3, September 2001
Pages	pp 371-384
Keywords	Memory and Reminiscence ; Mental ageing ; Age groups [elderly] ; Young adults [20-25].
Annotation	Working memory (WM) declines with age. Brain imaging studies indicate that ventral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is active when information is retained in WM, and that dorsal PFC is further activated for retention of large amounts of information. The authors examined the effect of ageing on activation in specific PFC regions during WM performance. 6 younger and 6 older adults performed a task in which, on each trial they encoded a 1- or 6-letter memory set, committed these letters to memory over 5 seconds, and determined whether or not a probe letter was part of the memory set. Comparisons of activation between the 1- and 6-letter conditions indicated age-equivalent ventral PFC activation. Younger adults showed greater dorsal PFC activation than older adults. Older adults showed greater dorsal PFC activation than younger adults. Ageing may affect dorsal PFC brain regions that are important for WM executive components. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-020111226 A
Classmark	DB: D6: BB: SD6
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.