Age-related Neural Correlates of Multifeatural Encoding

Past research has demonstrated age-related structural and functional changes that contribute to declines in episodic memory performance. More specifically, there have been age-related functional connectivity changes to key regions including the medial temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex, as well as within the default mode network. Prior studies investigating age-related episodic encoding have either performed activation analyses, or have performed functional connectivity analyses but only regarding memory of a single association or single feature. Hence, age-related connectivity changes for memory of multiple features remain widely unstudied. Using a fMRI multidimensional source memory paradigm, this study sought to further understand the effect of aging on intra-item multifeatural encoding connectivity. Overall, results supported the hypothesis that young adults would display significantly more functional connectivity relative to older adults to the frontal and parietal lobes for multifeatural trials. A majority of these regions were also corroborated by a similar multifeatural inter-item encoding study by James et al. (2019). However, this study was limited by a small sample size and decreased statistical power. Future studies should seek to address these limitations, investigate reconnectivity at retrieval, and attempt to better differentiate between connectivity unique to multifeatural inter-item versus intra-item encoding. Keywords: episodic memory, encoding, functional connectivity, agingBachelor of Art