See Blockindiscussions, Blockinstats, Blockinand Blockinauthor Blockinprofiles Blockinfor Blockinthis Blockinpublication Aging, Blockinself-referencing, Blockinand Blockinmedial Blockinprefrontal Cortex

Abstract The lateral prefrontal cortex undergoes both structural and functional changes with healthy aging. In contrast, there is little structural change in the medial prefrontal cortex, but relatively little is known about the functional changes to this region with age. Using an event-related fMRI design, we investigated the response of medial prefrontal cortex during self-referencing in order to compare age groups on a task that young and elderly perform similarly and that is known to actively engage the region in young adults. Nineteen young (M age = 23) and seventeen elderly (M age = 72) judged whether adjectives described themselves, another person, or were presented in upper case. We assessed the overlap in activations between young and elderly for the self-reference effect (self vs. other person), and found that both groups engage medial prefrontal cortex and mid-cingulate during self-referencing. The only cerebral differences between the groups in self versus other personality assessment were found in somatosensory and motor-related areas. In contrast, age-related modulations were found in the cerebral network recruited for emotional valence processing. Elderly (but not young) showed increased activity in the dorsal prefrontal cortex for positive relative to negative items, which could reflect an increase in controlled processing of positive information for elderly adults.

[1]  Denise C. Park,et al.  Long-Term Memory and Aging: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective , 2009 .

[2]  D. Schacter,et al.  Specificity of memory: Implications for individual and collective remembering , 2009 .

[3]  D. Schacter,et al.  Ageing and the self-reference effect in memory , 2007, Memory.

[4]  Michael W. L. Chee,et al.  Contextual interference in recognition memory with age , 2007, NeuroImage.

[5]  Philippe Fossati,et al.  Modulation of Memory Formation by Stimulus Content: Specific Role of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex in the Successful Encoding of Social Pictures , 2007, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[6]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  The fusiform face area: a cortical region specialized for the perception of faces , 2006, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[7]  William M. Kelley,et al.  Neuroanatomical Evidence for Distinct Cognitive and Affective Components of Self , 2006, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[8]  Leanne M Williams,et al.  The Mellow Years?: Neural Basis of Improving Emotional Stability over Age , 2006, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[9]  Edward T. Bullmore,et al.  Task-induced deactivations during successful paired associates learning: An effect of age but not Alzheimer's disease , 2006, NeuroImage.

[10]  D. Schacter,et al.  Processing emotional pictures and words: Effects of valence and arousal , 2006, Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience.

[11]  Marcia K. Johnson,et al.  Dissociating medial frontal and posterior cingulate activity during self-reflection. , 2006, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[12]  Bryan T. Denny,et al.  Medial prefrontal activity differentiates self from close others. , 2006, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[13]  Georg Northoff,et al.  Self-referential processing in our brain—A meta-analysis of imaging studies on the self , 2006, NeuroImage.

[14]  Anthony Randal McIntosh,et al.  Age-related Changes in Brain Activity across the Adult Lifespan , 2006, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[15]  S. Rombouts,et al.  Altered resting state networks in mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer's disease: An fMRI study , 2005, Human brain mapping.

[16]  Mara Mather,et al.  Goal-directed memory: the role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory. , 2005, Psychology and aging.

[17]  M. Mather,et al.  Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[18]  Benjamin J. Shannon,et al.  Molecular, Structural, and Functional Characterization of Alzheimer's Disease: Evidence for a Relationship between Default Activity, Amyloid, and Memory , 2005, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[19]  Maurizio Corbetta,et al.  The human brain is intrinsically organized into dynamic, anticorrelated functional networks. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[20]  Olivier Piguet,et al.  Memory for contextual details: effects of emotion and aging. , 2005, Psychology and aging.

[21]  C. Neil Macrae,et al.  Forming impressions of people versus inanimate objects: Social-cognitive processing in the medial prefrontal cortex , 2005, NeuroImage.

[22]  J. Gross,et al.  The cognitive control of emotion , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[23]  Cindy Lustig,et al.  Brain aging: reorganizing discoveries about the aging mind , 2005, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[24]  Martial Van der Linden,et al.  Self-referential reflective activity and its relationship with rest: a PET study , 2005, NeuroImage.

[25]  Robert C. Welsh,et al.  Aging and the Neural Correlates of Successful Picture Encoding: Frontal Activations Compensate for Decreased Medial-Temporal Activity , 2005, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[26]  Denise C. Park,et al.  Aging reduces neural specialization in ventral visual cortex. , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[27]  Cheryl L. Grady,et al.  Distributed self in episodic memory: neural correlates of successful retrieval of self-encoded positive and negative personality traits , 2004, NeuroImage.

[28]  A. Dale,et al.  Thinning of the cerebral cortex in aging. , 2004, Cerebral cortex.

[29]  Jane F. Banfield,et al.  Medial prefrontal activity predicts memory for self. , 2004, Cerebral cortex.

[30]  Sterling C. Johnson,et al.  Metacognitive evaluation, self-relevance, and the right prefrontal cortex , 2004, NeuroImage.

[31]  Mahzarin R. Banaji,et al.  Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory , 2004, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[32]  M. Greicius,et al.  Default-mode network activity distinguishes Alzheimer's disease from healthy aging: Evidence from functional MRI , 2004, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.

[33]  J. Morris,et al.  Functional deactivations: Change with age and dementia of the Alzheimer type , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[34]  F. Craik,et al.  In search of the emotional self: an fMRI study using positive and negative emotional words. , 2003, The American journal of psychiatry.

[35]  Perrine Ruby,et al.  A relation between rest and the self in the brain? , 2003, Brain Research Reviews.

[36]  Randy L Buckner,et al.  Functional–Anatomic Correlates of Control Processes in Memory , 2003, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[37]  M. Mather,et al.  Focusing on the positive: Age differences in memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli , 2003 .

[38]  Cheryl L Grady,et al.  Age‐related differences in the functional connectivity of the hippocampus during memory encoding , 2003, Hippocampus.

[39]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  Age effects on the neural correlates of successful memory encoding. , 2003, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[40]  T. Braver,et al.  A theory of cognitive control, aging cognition, and neuromodulation , 2002, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[41]  C. N. Macrae,et al.  Finding the Self? An Event-Related fMRI Study , 2002, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[42]  Beatriz Luna,et al.  Combining Brains: A Survey of Methods for Statistical Pooling of Information , 2002, NeuroImage.

[43]  Lynn Hasher,et al.  Truth and Character: Sources That Older Adults Can Remember , 2002, Psychological science.

[44]  Gary Glover,et al.  Aging effects on memory encoding in the frontal lobes. , 2002, Psychology and aging.

[45]  R. Cabeza Hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults: the HAROLD model. , 2002, Psychology and aging.

[46]  J. Callicott,et al.  Neurophysiological correlates of age-related changes in human motor function , 2002, Neurology.

[47]  J. Logan,et al.  Under-Recruitment and Nonselective Recruitment Dissociable Neural Mechanisms Associated with Aging , 2002, Neuron.

[48]  R. Nisbett,et al.  Cultural variation in verbal versus spatial neuropsychological function across the life span. , 2002, Neuropsychology.

[49]  M. Raichle,et al.  Searching for a baseline: Functional imaging and the resting human brain , 2001, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[50]  G. Shulman,et al.  Medial prefrontal cortex and self-referential mental activity: Relation to a default mode of brain function , 2001, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[51]  G L Shulman,et al.  INAUGURAL ARTICLE by a Recently Elected Academy Member:A default mode of brain function , 2001 .

[52]  N. Raz Aging of the brain and its impact on cognitive performance: Integration of structural and functional findings. , 2000 .

[53]  G. Winocur,et al.  In Search of the Self: A Positron Emission Tomography Study , 1999 .

[54]  M. Bradley,et al.  Affective Normsfor English Words (ANEW): Stimuli, instruction manual and affective ratings (Tech Report C-1) , 1999 .

[55]  M. Bradley,et al.  Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW): Instruction Manual and Affective Ratings , 1999 .

[56]  A M Dale,et al.  Optimal experimental design for event‐related fMRI , 1999, Human brain mapping.

[57]  L. Carstensen,et al.  Emotion and aging: experience, expression, and control. , 1997, Psychology and aging.

[58]  M. Corbetta,et al.  Common Blood Flow Changes across Visual Tasks: II. Decreases in Cerebral Cortex , 1997, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[59]  Anthony R. McIntosh,et al.  Age-Related Differences in Neural Activity during Memory Encoding and Retrieval: A Positron Emission Tomography Study , 1997, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[60]  J. H. Mueller,et al.  Self-referent processing of age-specific material. , 1986, Psychology and aging.

[61]  B. G. Rule,et al.  Memory for personally relevant information. , 1983 .

[62]  W. C. Shipley Shipley Institute of Living Scale , 1983 .

[63]  G. Maruyama,et al.  The "likeableness" of 555 personality trait words: Ten years later , 1976 .

[64]  S. Folstein,et al.  "Mini-mental state". A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. , 1975, Journal of psychiatric research.

[65]  N. Anderson Likableness ratings of 555 personality-trait words. , 1968, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[66]  M. Kendall Statistical Methods for Research Workers , 1937, Nature.

[67]  R. Fisher,et al.  Statistical Methods for Research Workers , 1930, Nature.