Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have taken a significant step in understanding how our brains change as we age, revealing insights that could help protect cognitive health in our later years.
Led by Dr. Michael Rugg, a team from the Center for Vital Longevity (CVL) has discovered that the reasons behind memory decline in older adults are more complex than previously thought.
Their study, detailed in The Journal of Neuroscience, shines a light on how aging affects the brain’s ability to process visual information.
As we grow older, even if we stay healthy, our brains start to mix up different types of visual information more than they used to.
This mix-up, known as neural dedifferentiation, means the brain isn’t as good at telling different things apart based on sight, which can lead to worse memory performance.
Imagine looking at a series of pictures—some of landscapes and others of various objects.
Younger brains can easily keep track of these categories and remember details about individual images. However, older brains tend to blur these distinctions, struggling more with both the categories and the specifics of each image.
To study this, Dr. Rugg and his team used functional MRI (fMRI) scans to watch how young and older adults’ brains reacted to images of scenes and objects.
With a group of young adults averaging 22 years old and another group averaging 69 years, they found some expected and some surprising things.
They anticipated and observed that older adults’ brains were less sharp at distinguishing between different scenes, but not objects, at a broad category level.
However, when it came to recognizing specific items, both scenes and objects, the older adults faced challenges, suggesting that the brain’s decline in distinguishing details happens for different reasons depending on whether the task is to recognize categories of items or individual items themselves.
This discovery is crucial. It means that just because we know how well someone’s brain can separate categories doesn’t mean we know how well it can pick out specific items.
There’s no one-size-fits-all explanation for how aging affects our brain’s ability to see differences, which has big implications for future research on aging and memory.
Sabina Srokova, a key contributor to the study and now a research associate at the University of Arizona, highlighted that their findings point to at least two separate processes reducing the brain’s ability to distinguish between different types of visual information in older adults.
This complexity adds a layer of challenge in understanding how our memory works as we age and how it relates to our ability to process visual information.
The next steps for the research team involve digging deeper into these mechanisms, particularly how the brain processes categories of information.
They plan to include eye-tracking in their future fMRI studies to gain more insights into the decline of visual processing and memory in older adults.
This research not only opens new avenues in the study of aging and cognitive health but also underscores the need for a tailored approach in investigating and eventually mitigating the impacts of aging on the brain.
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The research findings can be found in The Journal of Neuroscience.
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