RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Diminished Top-Down Control Underlies a Visual Imagery Deficit in Normal Aging
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 15768
OP 15774
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3209-11.2011
VO 31
IS 44
A1 Jonathan Kalkstein
A1 Kristen Checksfield
A1 Jacob Bollinger
A1 Adam Gazzaley
YR 2011
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/44/15768.abstract
AB Mental imagery is involved in a wide variety of cognitive abilities, including reasoning, spatial navigation, and memory. Cognitive aging is associated with impairments in these abilities, suggesting that diminished fidelity of mental images in older adults may be related to diverse cognitive deficits. However, an age-related deficit in mental imagery and its role in memory impairment is still a matter of debate. Previous human fMRI studies demonstrated that visual imagery activates representations in category-selective visual cortex via top-down control mechanisms. Here, we use fMRI to show that normal aging is associated with diminished selectivity of visual cortex activation during visual imagery, with a corresponding reduction in the selectivity of functional connections between prefrontal cortex and visual cortices. Moreover, a relationship between reduced imagery selectivity and visual memory in older adults was established. These results reveal that aging disrupts neural networks that subserve mental imagery and offers evidence of this as a factor in age-related memory decline.