Brain representations of visual short-term memories during healthy human aging: occipital decline and frontoparietal compensation
- 1University of Cambridge
Abstract
Visual short-term memory declines steeply with age, but the link to neural representations of memory content remains unknown. We used fMRI decoding to relate remembered motion-direction representations in visual and frontoparietal cortex to age and performance, in 115 adults, aged 25-87, from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) cohort. Decoding was strongest in visual cortex, but also significant in frontoparietal regions, with different profiles. Visual representations weakened with memory load and age, and statistically mediated age-related performance decline, especially during recall. This coupling, however, weakened with age: some older adults retained stronger visual representations than performance implied, suggesting impaired access to a partially preserved memory trace. Frontoparietal representations, instead, were largely insensitive to load and strengthened with age during maintenance, partially offsetting performance decline. Therefore, interventions to boost VSTM in older adults might target compensatory frontoparietal representations during memory maintenance, and readout of untapped visual representations at recall.
Related
- Effect of stimulation parameters for transcranial temporal interference stimulation to enhance occipital alpha-oscillations in healthy participants
- Endogenous progesterone blurs frontostriatal representations of emotion control in healthy young women
- Frontoparietal effective connectivity supports working memory in early childhood
- Differential impact of isoflurane on the topological organization of frontoparietal network in macaques
- Electroencephalographic activity patterns distinguish interdigitated default and frontoparietal networks
BibTeX
@misc{mitchell2026brain,
title = {{Brain representations of visual short-term memories during healthy human aging: occipital decline and frontoparietal compensation}},
author = {D. J. Mitchell and Cam-CAN and R. Cusack},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.26.761884},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.26.761884v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Brain representations of visual short-term memories during healthy human aging: occipital decline and frontoparietal compensation
AU - D. J. Mitchell
AU - Cam-CAN
AU - R. Cusack
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.26.761884
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.26.761884v1
AB - Visual short-term memory declines steeply with age, but the link to neural representations of memory content remains unknown. We used fMRI decoding to relate remembered motion-direction representations in visual and frontoparietal cortex to age and performance, in 115 adults, aged 25-87, from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) cohort. Decoding was strongest in visual cortex, but also significant in frontoparietal regions, with different profiles. Visual representations weakened with memory load and age, and statistically mediated age-related performance decline, especially during recall. This coupling, however, weakened with age: some older adults retained stronger visual representations than performance implied, suggesting impaired access to a partially preserved memory trace. Frontoparietal representations, instead, were largely insensitive to load and strengthened with age during maintenance, partially offsetting performance decline. Therefore, interventions to boost VSTM in older adults might target compensatory frontoparietal representations during memory maintenance, and readout of untapped visual representations at recall.
ER -