Despite dense amnesia, patients with hippocampal lesions show partially intact navigation for recent and remotely learned environments.

The extent to which medial temporal lobe amnesia affects recently compared to remotely formed memories remains debated. Some studies have investigated this issue by employing either verbal recall of routes or map drawing, suggesting profound loss of recent yet largely intact remote spatial memory. Here, we studied navigation in two patients with amnesia and their matched controls by recreating virtual versions of their recent and remote neighborhoods.

Modeling memories, predicting prospections: Automated scoring of autobiographical detail narration using large language models.

The autobiographical interview is a widely used tool for examining memory and related cognitive functions. It provides a standardized framework to differentiate between internal details, representing the episodic features of specific events, and external details, including semantic knowledge and other non-episodic information. This study introduces an automated scoring model for autobiographical memory and future thinking tasks, using large language models (LLMs) that can analyze personal event narratives without preprocessing.

Regional network covariance patterns of white matter integrity related to cardiorespiratory fitness in healthy aging.

Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), measured by VOmax, is an indicator of vascular functioning that can influence the integrity of brain microstructural white matter tracts in aging. How CRF is related to regional patterns of white matter bundles for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) diffusion metrics (axial diffusivity, AD; radial diffusivity, RD; mean diffusivity, MD; fractional anisotropy, FA) has been less studied. We used a multivariate analysis method, the Scaled Subprofile Model (SSM), to identify network patterns of MRI tract-specific white matter integrity (WMI) for AD, RD, MD, and FA related to VOmax and to evaluate their relation to demographic, vascular health, and dementia risk factors in 167 cognitively unimpaired older adults, ages 50 to 88.

Younger and Older Adults' Aging Well Construals: A Quantitative Word Use and Topics Comparison.

Introduction: Individuals' construals of aging capture how they think of aging, and what aging well means to them. Assessing such construals is important for understanding attitudes toward aging and, ultimately, how to tailor personalized aging well interventions to an individual.

Methods: We analyzed 100 younger adults (YAs)' and 92 older adults (OAs)' spoken narratives of what aging well means to them using two language analysis approaches, closed-vocabulary, word count analysis via Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and open-vocabulary, word co-occurrence analysis via topic modeling.

Subcortical brain volumetric differences related to white matter lesion volume and cognition in healthy aging.

White matter hyperintensity (WMH) lesions associated with small vessel cerebrovascular disease (CVD) are common structural neuroimaging findings in older adults. Greater global brain WMH burden related to aging has been implicated in dementia but has also been linked to brain atrophy and cognitive dysfunction in old age. We sought to investigate the regionally distributed association of global WMH lesion load with subcortical gray matter (SGM) volumes using a multivariate network analysis method in 178 community-dwelling, healthy older adults (mean age = 69.

A novel scoring protocol reveals age-related differences in abstract compared to concrete thinking in cued autobiographical remembering.

Human imagination has garnered growing interest in many fields. However, it remains unclear how to characterize different forms of imaginative thinking and how imagination differs between young and older adults. Here, we introduce a novel scoring protocol based on recent theoretical developments in the cognitive neuroscience of imagination to provide a broad tool with which to characterize imaginative thinking.

Shape of the past: Revealing detail arcs while narrating memories of autobiographical life events across the lifespan.

Humans can remember past autobiographical events through extended narratives. How these narrated memories typically unfold, however, remains largely unexplored. We evaluated how autobiographical memory details typically come together in a sample of 235 healthy young, middle-aged, and older adults.

Interoceptive Accuracy Enhances Deception Detection in Older Adults.

Objectives: Difficulties with deception detection may leave older adults especially vulnerable to fraud. Interoception, that is, the awareness of one's bodily signals, has been shown to influence deception detection, but this relationship has not been examined in aging yet. The present study investigated effects of interoceptive accuracy on 2 forms of deception detection: detecting interpersonal lies in videos and identifying text-based deception in phishing emails.

Cortical lobar volume reductions associated with homocysteine-related subcortical brain atrophy and poorer cognition in healthy aging.

Homocysteine (Hcy) is a cardiovascular risk factor implicated in cognitive impairment and cerebrovascular disease but has also been associated with Alzheimer's disease. In 160 healthy older adults (mean age = 69.66 ± 9.

Creative minds at rest: Creative individuals are more associative and engaged with their idle thoughts.

Despite an established body of research characterizing how creative individuals explore their world, relatively little is known about how such individuals navigate their , especially in unstructured contexts such as periods of awake rest. Across two studies, the present manuscript tested the hypothesis that creative individuals are more engaged with their idle thoughts and more associative in the dynamic transitions between them. Study 1 captured the real-time conscious experiences of 81 adults as they voiced aloud the content of their mind moment-by-moment across a 10-minute unconstrained baseline period.

Phishing vulnerability compounded by older age, apolipoprotein E e4 genotype, and lower cognition.

With technological advancements, financial exploitation tactics have expanded into the online realm. Older adults may be particularly susceptible to online scams due to age- and Alzheimer's disease-related changes in cognition. In this study, 182 adults ranging from 18 to 90 years underwent cognitive assessment, genotyping for apolipoprotein E e4 (APOE4), and completed the lab-based Short Phishing Email Suspicion Test (S-PEST) as well as the real-life PHishing Internet Task (PHIT).

Speaking Well and Feeling Good: Age-Related Differences in the Affective Language of Resting State Thought.

Unlabelled: Despite the prevalence and importance of resting state thought for daily functioning and psychological well-being, it remains unclear how such thoughts differ between young and older adults. Age-related differences in the affective tone of resting state thoughts, including the affective language used to describe them, could be a novel manifestation of the positivity effect, with implications for well-being. To examine this possibility, a total of 77 young adults ( = 24.

Direct access to specific autobiographical memories is lower in healthy middle-aged to older adult Apolipoprotein E ε4 carriers compared to non-carriers.

Recent research suggests that the retrieval of autobiographical memories among cognitively healthy middle-aged and older adults is sensitive to the Apolipoprotein E ε4 (APOE4) allele, a genetic marker that increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia. However, whether the APOE4-associated alteration in autobiographical memory retrieval encompasses rapid (i.e.

How ready is speech-to-text for psychological language research? Evaluating the validity of AI-generated English transcripts for analyzing free-spoken responses in younger and older adults.

For the longest time, the gold standard in preparing spoken language corpora for text analysis in psychology was using human transcription. However, such standard comes at extensive cost, and creates barriers to quantitative spoken language analysis that recent advances in speech-to-text technology could address. The current study quantifies the accuracy of AI-generated transcripts compared to human-corrected transcripts across younger (n = 100) and older (n = 92) adults and two spoken language tasks.

The hippocampus supports precise memory for public events regardless of their remoteness.

The necessity of the human hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe structures to semantic memory remains contentious. Impaired semantic memory following hippocampal lesions could arise either due to partially intertwined episodic memories and/or retrograde/anterograde effects. In this study, we tested amnesic individuals with lesions in hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe (n = 7) and age-matched controls (n = 14) on their ability to precisely recall the dates of famous public events that occurred either before (i.

Retrieving autobiographical memories in autobiographical contexts: are age-related differences in narrated episodic specificity present outside of the laboratory?

The Autobiographical Interview, a method for evaluating detailed memory of real-world events, reliably detects differences in episodic specificity at retrieval between young and older adults in the laboratory. Whether this age-associated reduction in episodic specificity for autobiographical event retrieval is present outside of the laboratory remains poorly understood. We used a videoconference format to administer the Autobiographical Interview to cognitively unimpaired older adults (N = 49, M = 69.

Regional covariance of white matter hyperintensity volume patterns associated with hippocampal volume in healthy aging.

Hippocampal volume is particularly sensitive to the accumulation of total brain white matter hyperintensity volume (WMH) in aging, but how the regional distribution of WMH volume differentially impacts the hippocampus has been less studied. In a cohort of 194 healthy older adults ages 50-89, we used a multivariate statistical method, the Scaled Subprofile Model (SSM), to (1) identify patterns of regional WMH differences related to left and right hippocampal volumes, (2) examine associations between the multimodal neuroimaging covariance patterns and demographic characteristics, and (3) investigate the relation of the patterns to subjective and objective memory in healthy aging. We established network covariance patterns of regional WMH volume differences associated with greater left and right hippocampal volumes, which were characterized by reductions in left temporal and right parietal WMH volumes and relative increases in bilateral occipital WMH volumes.

Impact of age and apolipoprotein E ε4 status on regional white matter hyperintensity volume and cognition in healthy aging.

Objective: White matter hyperintensity (WMH) volume is a neuroimaging marker of lesion load related to small vessel disease that has been associated with cognitive aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk.

Method: The present study sought to examine whether regional WMH volume mediates the relationship between APOE ε4 status, a strong genetic risk factor for AD, and cognition and if this association is moderated by age group differences within a sample of 187 healthy older adults (APOE ε4 status [carrier/non-carrier] = 56/131).

Results: After we controlled for sex, education, and vascular risk factors, ANCOVA analyses revealed significant age group by APOE ε4 status interactions for right parietal and left temporal WMH volumes.

Age differences in spatial memory are mitigated during naturalistic navigation.

Spatial navigation deficits are often observed among older adults on tasks that require navigating virtual reality (VR) environments on a computer screen. We investigated whether these age differences are attenuated when tested in more naturalistic and ambulatory virtual environments. In Experiment 1, young and older adults navigated a variant of the Morris Water Maze task in each of two VR conditions: a desktop VR condition which required using a mouse and keyboard to navigate, and an ambulatory VR condition which permitted unrestricted locomotion.

Hippocampal contributions to novel spatial learning are both age-related and age-invariant.

Older adults show declines in spatial memory, although the extent of these alterations is not uniform across the healthy older population. Here, we investigate the stability of neural representations for the same and different spatial environments in a sample of younger and older adults using high-resolution functional MRI of the medial temporal lobes. Older adults showed, on average, lower neural pattern similarity for retrieving the same environment and more variable neural patterns compared to young adults.

Loneliness and social isolation are not associated with executive functioning in a cross-sectional study of cognitively healthy older adults.

The literature on the relationship between social interaction and executive functions (EF) in older age is mixed, perhaps stemming from differences in EF measures and the conceptualization/measurement of social interaction. We investigated the relationship between social interaction and EF in 102 cognitively unimpaired older adults (ages 65-90). Participants received an EF battery to measure working memory, inhibition, shifting, and global EF.

Evidence of Impaired Remote Experience-near Semantic Memory in Medial Temporal Lobe Amnesia.

Neuropsychological research suggests that "experience-near" semantic memory, meaning knowledge attached to a spatiotemporal or event context, is commonly impaired in individuals who have medial temporal lobe amnesia. It is not known if this impairment extends to remotely acquired experience-near knowledge, which is a question relevant to understanding hippocampal/medial temporal lobe functioning. In the present study, we administered a novel semantic memory task designed to target knowledge associated with remote, "dormant" concepts, in addition to knowledge associated with active concepts, to four individuals with medial temporal lobe amnesia and eight matched controls.

Differences in the content and coherence of autobiographical memories between younger and older adults: Insights from text analysis.

Several studies have shown that older adults generate autobiographical memories with fewer specific details than younger adults, a pattern typically attributed to age-relate declines in episodic memory. A relatively unexplored question is how aging affects the content used to represent and recall these memories. We recently proposed that older adults may predominately represent and recall autobiographical memories at the gist level.

Hippocampal contributions to novel spatial learning are both age-related and age-invariant.

Older adults show declines in spatial memory, although the extent of these alterations is not uniform across the healthy older population. Here, we investigate the stability of neural representations for the same and different spatial environments in a sample of younger and older adults using high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the medial temporal lobe. Older adults showed, on average, lower neural pattern similarity for retrieving the same environment and more variable neural patterns compared to young adults.

Age differences in spatial memory are mitigated during naturalistic navigation.

Spatial navigation deficits in older adults are well documented. These findings are often based on experimental paradigms that require using a joystick or keyboard to navigate a virtual desktop environment. In the present study, we investigated whether age differences in spatial memory are attenuated when tested in a more naturalistic and ambulatory virtual environment.