Use it or lose it? SES mitigates age-related decline in a recency/recognition task.

Full Abstract

An important goal of aging research is to determine factors leading to individual differences that might compensate for some of the deleterious effects of aging on cognition. To determine whether socio-economic status (SES) plays a role in mitigating age-related decrements in the recollection of contextual details, we categorized older participants into low- and high-SES groups. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were recorded in a picture memory task involving recency and recognition judgments. Young, old-low and old-high SES groups did not differ in recognition performance. However, on recency judgments, old-low subjects performed at chance, whereas old-high subjects did not differ significantly from young adults. Consistent with their preserved recency performance, a long-duration frontal negativity was significantly larger for recency compared to recognition trials in the ERPs of the old-high SES group only. These data suggest that older adults with higher SES levels can use strategies to compensate for the adverse effects of aging in complex source memory tasks by recruiting additional neural resources apparently not required by the young.

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Author information

Author/s: Czernochowski, Daniela (D); Fabiani, Monica (M); Friedman, David (D);

Affiliation: Cognitive Electrophysiology Laboratory, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY 10032, United States.

Grants: AG05213 (Agency:United States NIA) ; AG21887 (Agency:United States NIA) ; R01 AG005213-19 (Agency:United States NIA) ; R01 AG009988-12 (Agency:United States NIA)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

Journal: Neurobiology of aging (Neurobiol Aging), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Jun; vol 29 (issue 6) : pp 945-58

Dates: Created 2008/04/28; Completed 2008/06/20;

PMID: 17280741, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Age Factors
Aged
Aging
Female
Humans
Incidence
Judgment

Judgment
Male
Memory Disorders - diagnosis; epidemiology; physiopathology
New York - epidemiology
Risk Assessment - methods
Risk Factors
Social Class
Task Performance and Analysis

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