Ageing brains ‘compensate’ for poorer memory performance
Older people take longer to perform memory tasks and use different regions of the brain, according to a new Australian study.
Ageing brains ‘compensate’ for declining memory performance by going slower, according to a new study from Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology.
The study compared the brain activity of men aged 59-67 with men aged 20-30, while both groups performed a range of memory-related tasks.
The simpler tasks assessed ‘working memory’ and the more difficult tasks assessed short-term recognition of visual images.
Similar levels of accuracy were achieved by both groups but response times were slower for the older adults across all tasks.
“It is well known that as people age they experience a decline in memory performance,” said PhD student, Helen MacPherson, who led the study.
“The research findings showed that some changes in brain activity may reflect the brain’s effort to compensate for this decline.”
MacPherson found the older adults had less brain activity than the younger adults when performing easy tasks and more brain activity when performing more complex tasks.
The results also revealed that older and younger adults relied on different brain regions in order to perform the same recognition functions.
“At low task demands, such as simply remembering the shape of an irregular object, older adults don’t need to recruit additional neural resources in order to successfully complete the task,” Ms Macpherson said.
“But with increased task difficulty such as recognising pictures of everyday objects and then making a contextual judgment about where these images were presented on a computer screen, more parts of the brain come into play.”
The results of the study were published in the April issue of Brain and Cognition.
