Does Cue Focality Modulate Age-related Performance in Prospective Memory? An fMRI Investigation

ABSTRACT

How prospective memory (PM) weakens with increasing age has been largely debated. We hypothesized that automatic and strategic PM processes, respectively mediated by focal and non-focal cues, are differently affected by aging, even starting from 50–60 years of age. We investigated this issue using a 2 × 2 design in which focal and non-focal experimental conditions were created by varying the conjoint nature of the ongoing task (lexical decision vs. syllable matching tasks) and the PM cue (words vs. syllables). In the whole-brain analysis we found that the left inferior frontal gyrus and the middle cingulate cortex were more activated when young compared to older individuals performed a PM task; moreover, the anterior cingulate cortex was selectively activated during non-focal PM when the cues were words. In a region-of-interest analysis we observed that the medial and the lateral portions of the rostral prefrontal cortex were associated with the focal and non-focal conditions respectively, more in young than in older adults. Our findings provide evidence in support of early age-related differences in automatic/strategic PM functioning.

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Steve Gazzitano, Fabio Cannata, Valentina Fullone and prof. Claire Montagna for their precious assistance at various stages of this work.

Disclosure Statement

No author declared a conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the standards of the Ethics Committee of IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation (Rome, IT) committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.