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Poster A49 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Identifying a Shared Source of Age-related Decline in Working Memory and Decision-making
Jade S. Duffy1 (), Hannah H. McDermott2, Robert Whelan1, Redmond G. O'Connell1, Peter R. Murphy3; 1Trinity College Dublin, 2Free University, Berlin, 3Maynooth University, Kildare, Ireland
As population aging burgeons globally, a major imperative exists to identify mechanisms of cognitive decline associated with aging. Working memory (WM) and decision-making (DM) are key cognitive functions that deteriorate with age. Emergent evidence from computational and empirical work has pointed to shared neural mechanisms underpinning both processes. The present study leverages this consolidative framework to identify shared and distinct sources of age-related decline in WM and DM. Younger and older adults (YA & OA) completed psychophysical tasks tailored to parse sources of variance in WM and DM reports, while scalp EEG and pupil data were recorded. Analyses of noise and bias in WM and DM behavior, decoding of EEG signals, and interrogation of phasic pupil-linked arousal converge to suggest that a leading source of age-related dysfunction - degraded sensory encoding - gives rise to decline across both domains. Taken together, these findings provide novel insights into the neural basis of WM and DM and their susceptibility to the inimical effects of aging.
Keywords: Decision-making Working memory EEG Pupillometry