FriSem

Date
Fri May 19th 2023, 3:15 - 4:30pm
Location
Psychology Department, Building 420, room 050

Douglas Miller and Shawn Schwartz, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Title: Tonic Attentional Influences on Memory Retrieval in Young and Older Adults

Many sources of variance are thought to contribute to the act of retrieving memories, including our goals, arousal, and attention before and during the time of remembering. Evidence of reductions in cognitive control/attentional processes are seen in healthy aging and have been linked to deficits in memory retrieval in older adults. Given the ensemble of interacting neural mechanisms thought to support the unlocking of episodic details in our minds, how then are readouts of episodic memory influenced by moment-to-moment fluctuations in goal-state representations, arousal/attention, and activity in cognitive control networks, and furthermore, how are these mechanisms burdened in clinically unimpaired older individuals harboring Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology? In this work-in-progress talk, we will further break down the motivation for our multimodal neuroimaging study funded by the National Institute on Aging for which we are actively recruiting and collecting data from young (18-30 years) and older (65-80 years) adults. We aim to illustrate our core research questions and hypotheses, describe the experimental paradigm as well as process by which AD pathology in our sample of cognitively unimpaired older adults is assessed via molecular imaging with Aβ-PET, and share out some preliminary behavioral and pupillometry data (i.e., putative assay of preparatory sustained attention). Lastly, we hope to have an engaging discussion with the FriSem community regarding some of our planned functional/structural neuroimaging analyses, and gladly welcome feedback regarding additional analyses we might consider running given the multimodal nature of our project.