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Poster B22 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Age-related declines in visual working memory capacity are linked to reduced levels of parietal glutamate.
matthew nassar1, Mingjian He2, Jordan Feldman1, Caroline McLaughlin1, Elena Festa1, Takeo Watanabe1, Edward Walsh1, Michael Frank1; 1Brown University, 2Stanford University
Cognitive aging involves marked declines in working memory (WM) systems that are thought to implement active maintenance of information through recurrent glutamatergic excitation. Our recent work has highlighted that even the simplest forms of visual short term memory capacity are affected by compression strategies such as storing multiple memoranda in a single chunk (chunking). Here we examined the molecular and computational basis for age-related deficits in WM using a visual short-term memory task and modeling framework capable of distinguishing contributions of chunking from overall capacity, paired with magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Our results reveal that age-related declines in visual short-term memory are primarily due to reduced capacity, rather than chunking, and were linked to reductions in parietal glutamate. This association held even after controlling for structural brain differences, as well as glutamate and GABA levels in other brain regions. Taken together, our results support the idea that metabolic changes across healthy aging alter macroscopic neurotransmitter concentrations that have regional impacts on cognitive faculties.
Keywords: working memory cognitive aging glutamate