Understanding associative false memories in aging using multivariate analyses

Abstract

Age-related declines in associative memory are ubiquitous, having been observed across a wide array of stimuli and experimental paradigms. Research further shows that such decreases in behavioral discriminability arise from increases in false memories for recombined lures. The current study examined the underlying neural basis of associative false memories by using representational similarity analyses to examine both age differences in the reactivation of encoded representations during retrieval and the neural overlap in the similarity of neural patterns underlying targets and related lures during retrieval. Behaviorally, we observed an age-related reduction in d, which was shown to be driven by increased false alarms in the older adults. While we found no age difference in the relationship between patterns of neural activity underlying hits across memory phases (as measured by ERS), the similarity of neural patterns underlying targets and lures was affected by age. Specifically, while younger and older adults exhibited overall higher pattern similarity between hits and CRs compared to hits and FAs (as measured by RSA), this difference was reduced in older adults within occipital cortices. Additionally, greater Hit-FA representational similarity correlated with increases in associative FAs across occipital, frontal, and parietal cortices. Results suggest that while neural representations underlying targets may not differ across age, greater pattern similarity between the neural representation of targets and lures may reflect reduced distinctiveness of the information encoded in memory, such that old and new items are more difficult to discriminate, leading to more false alarms.