IMPROVING EVERYDAY MEMORY IN HEALTHY AGING AND EARLY ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

项目摘要/摘要 对最近发生的事件的记忆对于日常环境中的有效运作至关重要。 想象一下，有人要退休了，要搬到一个新城市和家人在一起。事件记忆将允许他们 记住如何去杂货店，在哪个过道里找麦片，哪个邻居的 孩子们询问修剪草坪的事，以及检查邮件是否到达的时间是否足够晚。 事件记忆障碍正是导致老年人进入神经科诊所和 引起人们对他们可能患上阿尔茨海默病(AD)的担忧-这两种疾病都是主要的流行病学 令人担忧的是，鉴于老年人人口和阿尔茨海默病患者的数量正在增长 戏剧性的。然而，这种内存与通常情况下的内存之间存在很大的差距 在心理学和神经科学实验室研究，通过向人们呈现断开的 文字、图片或句子。 最近的经验和理论结果已经确定了专门的神经和计算 将正在进行的活动划分为有意义的事件的机制，并已表明这些 机制对于记忆的形成很重要。在这个提案中，我们描述了一种新的合成和 基于这些，扩展了先前关于年龄和阿尔茨海默病对记忆影响的方法 创新。这一综合为更好地理解生物多样性的机制提供了机会 人类记忆编码随年龄和AD的变化而变化，同时测试小说的潜力 干预措施：潜在的临床应用于改善记忆。这个项目将充分利用 这一机会，实现了三个具体目标： 具体目标1将测试对事件分段的关注是否以及如何提高老年人的 对日常活动的记忆从几分钟到一周都在延迟。两个动力强大的实验将 将一项有希望的干预扩展到以下几个方面： 年龄较大的成年人样本，测试记忆力的延迟长达一个月。 《特定目标2》将检验有效的事件分割可以提高 老年人后部/内侧记忆表征的分辨率。中的结构 内侧颞叶和后内侧顶叶皮质已被证明在事件中很重要 并受到健康衰老和早期阿尔茨海默病的影响。两项研究将测试是否改善了 事件分割提高了这些区域中内存表示的分辨率。 具体目标3将测试分割的机制和后果 早期有症状的阿尔茨海默病维持或损害了病情的改善。公元早期 有选择地损害被认为对代表事件很重要的系统 回忆。两项研究将测试改进事件分割改善事件的可能性 早期症状性AD患者的记忆力。

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Memory for events in the recent past is crucial for effective functioning in everyday environments. Imagine someone is retiring and moving to a new city to be with family. Event memory will allow them to remember how to get to the grocery store and in which aisle to look for cereal, which neighbor's child to ask about mowing the lawn, and whether it is late enough to check if the mail has arrived. Failures of event memory are exactly the problems that bring elders into the neurological clinic and raise concerns that they may be developing Alzheimer's disease (AD)—both major epidemiological concerns, given that the population of older adults and the number of people with AD are growing dramatically. However, there is a large gap between this kind of memory and memory as it is usually studied in the psychological and neuroscientific laboratory, by presenting people with disconnected words, pictures, or sentences. Recent empirical and theoretical results have identified specialized neural and computational mechanisms that segment ongoing activity into meaningful events and have shown that these mechanisms are important for memory formation. In this proposal, we describe a novel synthesis and extension of previous approaches to the effects of age and AD on memory, based on these innovations. This synthesis opens up an opportunity to better understand how the mechanisms of human memory encoding change with age and AD, and at the same time to test the potential of novel interventions for potential clinical application to memory improvement. This project will capitalize on this opportunity, achieving three specific aims: Specific Aim 1 will test whether and how attention to event segmentation improves elders' memory for everyday activity at delays from minutes to week. Two well-powered experiments will extend a promising intervention that has been shown to improve event memory in young adults to older adult samples, testing memory at delays up to one month. Specific Aim 2 will test the hypothesis that effective event segmentation improves the resolution of elders' posterior/medial memory representations. Structures in the medial temporal lobes and posterior medial parietal cortex have been shown to be important for event memory and are affected by healthy aging and early AD. Two studies will test whether improving event segmentation improves the resolution of memory representations in these regions. Specific Aim 3 will test whether the mechanisms and consequences of segmentation improvement are maintained or impaired by early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease. Early AD selectively impairs the very systems that are proposed to be important for representing event memories. Two studies will test the possibility that improving event segmentation improves event memory in people with early symptomatic AD.