Spatial Memory and Aging: Performance on a Human Analog of the Morris Water Maze

Newman, Mary C.; Kaszniak, Alfred W.

doi:10.1076/1382-5585(200006)7:2;1-u;ft086

Cited by 122 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Deficits were observed in reinforced alternation, spatial water maze, Lashley Maze, radial arm maze, odor discrimination, and tests of working memory span and capacity. Given that at least two of the tasks (the water maze and radial arm maze) in this cognitive test battery were specifically designed to impinge on spatial abilities, the deficits among aged animals in this "spatial domain" are consistent with previous observations in both aging rodents (e.g., Barnes 1979;Bach et al 1999) and humans (e.g., Newman and Kaszniak 2000). In contrast, aged animals did not differ from their young counterparts in the acquisition of a fear conditioned response or passive avoidance.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Age-related declines in general cognitive abilities of Balb/C mice are associated with disparities in working memory, body weight, and general activity

Matzel¹,

Grossman²,

Light³

et al. 2008

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A defining characteristic of age-related cognitive decline is a deficit in general cognitive performance. Here we use a testing and analysis regimen that allows us to characterize the general learning abilities of young (3-5 mo old) and aged (19-21 mo old) male and female Balb/C mice. Animals' performance was assessed on a battery of seven diverse learning tasks. Aged animals exhibited deficits in five of the seven tasks and ranked significantly lower than their young counterparts in general learning abilities (aggregate performance across the battery of tasks). Aging added variability to common core performance (i.e., general learning ability), which translated into increased variability on the individual cognitive tasks. Relatedly, general learning abilities did not differ between the two ages among the best quartile of learners (i.e., cognitive abilities were spared in a subsample of the aged animals). Additionally, working memory capacity (resistance to interference) and duration (resistance to decay) accounted for significantly more of the variability in general learning abilities in aged relative to young animals. Tests of 15 noncognitive performance variables indicated that an increase in body weight (and an associtaed decrease in general activity) was characteristic of those aged animals which exhibited deficient general learning abilities. These results suggest the possibility that general cognitive deficits in aged animals reflect a failure of specific components of the working memory system, and may be related to variations in body weight and an associated decrease in activity.Broad and general learning deficits are a defining feature of the cognitive phenotype of elderly humans. However, investigations of the neurological basis of age-related cognitive decline (particularly in nonhuman animals) have typically focused on specific types or classes of cognitive abilities. Although the effects of aging on hippocampus-dependent cognitive processes have been well documented (for reviews, see Gallagher and Rapp 1997;Rosenzweig and Barnes 2003), and multivariate approaches to the assessment of the impact of aging on noncognitive classes of behavior have been reported (e.g., Markowska and Breckler 1999), systematic efforts to describe learning impairments that transcend single domains of cognitive abilities have been rare. Notwithstanding the success of efforts to characterize the impact of aging on cognitive "domains," the lack of attention to domain-independent (i.e., "general") cognitive abilities limits the functional application of these conclusions. The absence of animal studies of age-related declines in general cognitive abilities is especially problematic in light of data obtained from human test batteries which indicate that age-related learning deficits transcend specific domains of learning and are expressed independently of the sensory, motor, motivational, or information processing demands of individual learning tasks. It has been estimated that as much as 25%-50% of the age-related decline in c...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Age-related declines in general cognitive abilities of Balb/C mice are associated with disparities in working memory, body weight, and general activity

Matzel¹,

Grossman²,

Light³

et al. 2008

Learn. Mem.

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“…Studies on the effects of aging in the rat hippocampus have revealed that aged rats show deficits in the storage and retrieval of information about the spatial organization of their environment (Rosenzweig and Barnes 2003). A similar pattern of impairment has been found in aged mice (Bach et al 1999), nonhuman primates (Rapp et al 1997), and humans (e.g., Uttl and Graf 1993;Wilkniss et al 1997;Newman and Kaszniak 2000;Moffat et al 2001). It has also been shown that given a complex enough task, old individuals require more practice than young individuals to perform equivalently, or, given the same number of trials, they do not perform as reliably (Barnes 1979).…”

Section: Plasticity Of the Aging Brainmentioning

confidence: 66%

The effect of age on a visual learning task in the American cockroach

Brown

Strausfeld²

2009

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Neuronal modifications that accompany normal aging occur in brain neuropils and might share commonalties across phyla including the most successful group, the Insecta. This study addresses the kinds of neuronal modifications associated with loss of memory that occur in the hemimetabolous insect Periplaneta americana. Among insects that display considerable longevity, the American cockroach lives up to 64 wk and reveals specific cellular alterations in its mushroom bodies, higher centers that have been shown to be associated with learning and memory. The present results describe a vision-based learning paradigm, based on a modified Barnes maze, that compares memory in young (10-wk old), middle-aged (30-wk old), and aged adults (50-wk old). We show that not only is the performance of this task during the 14 training trials significantly decremented in aged cockroaches, but that aged cockroaches show significant impairment in successfully completing a crucial test involving cue rotation. Light and electron microscopical examination of the brains of these different age groups reveal major changes in neuron morphology and synaptology in the mushroom body lobes, centers shown to underlie place memory in this taxon.

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“…many of the memory problems reported with increasing age. Aging is associated with a decline in episodic memory formation (37), spatial memory and navigation (38), contextual source memory (39), and recollection (40,41). These functions require intact pattern separation circuitry (7,42).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-related memory deficits linked to circuit-specific disruptions in the hippocampus

Yassa

Mattfeld

Stark

et al. 2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

389

406

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Converging data from rodents and humans have demonstrated an age-related decline in pattern separation abilities (the ability to discriminate among similar experiences). Several studies have proposed the dentate and CA3 subfields of the hippocampus as the potential locus of this change. Specifically, these studies identified rigidity in place cell remapping in similar environments in the CA3. We used high-resolution fMRI to examine activity profiles in the dentate gyrus and CA3 in young and older adults as stimulus similarity was incrementally varied. We report evidence for "representational rigidity" in older adults' dentate/CA3 that is linked to behavioral discrimination deficits. Using ultrahigh-resolution diffusion imaging, we quantified both the integrity of the perforant path as well as dentate/CA3 dendritic changes and found that both were correlated with dentate/CA3 functional rigidity. These results highlight structural and functional alterations in the hippocampal network that predict age-related changes in memory function and present potential targets for intervention.L ong-term memory function is commonly known to deteriorate with increasing age. One of the sites that undergo the earliest changes is the hippocampus (1, 2), which has a well-known role in learning new facts and remembering events (3). Recently, electrophysiological recording studies in aged rodents have shed light on some of the possible neural mechanisms in the hippocampus that underlie this decline (1). These studies have demonstrated "rigidity" in aged CA3 place cell firing patterns in similar environments. In contrast to young CA3 place cells, which readily remap and shift their representations in these environments, aged CA3 place cells retain their original fields despite the changes in the environment. These data strongly suggest that aging is associated with a diminished capacity for pattern separation (learning new information by decorrelating similar inputs to avoid interference) and an increased propensity for pattern completion (retrieval of previously stored information from a partial cue), and further suggest that this shift could be the result of a functional imbalance in the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG) and CA3 network.The role of hippocampal subfields in these key processes has long been hypothesized in computational models (4-7). The models suggest that the DG granule cells are capable of performing especially strong pattern separation on the distributed representations arriving from layer II entorhinal neurons, projecting this signal onto the CA3 subfield of the hippocampus via the strong mossy fiber pathway. Empirical evidence for the involvement of the DG and CA3 in pattern separation has been demonstrated by using electrophysiological recordings (8-10), immediate-early genes (11), and high-resolution functional MRI in humans (12, 13). Ablation studies using DG-specific ibotenic acid lesions (14), as well as genetic NMDA receptor knockouts (15), have additionally shown that the DG is critical for, and the likely ...

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Spatial Memory and Aging: Performance on a Human Analog of the Morris Water Maze

Cited by 122 publications

References 25 publications

Age-related declines in general cognitive abilities of Balb/C mice are associated with disparities in working memory, body weight, and general activity

Age-related declines in general cognitive abilities of Balb/C mice are associated with disparities in working memory, body weight, and general activity

The effect of age on a visual learning task in the American cockroach

Age-related memory deficits linked to circuit-specific disruptions in the hippocampus

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