Early prefrontal activation as a mechanism to prevent forgetting in the context of interference.

Objective: Recent research has focused on interference resolution deficits as the main cause of short-term memory decreases in aging. To determine whether activation of brain compensatory mechanisms occur during the encoding process in older people. Moreover, two different levels of interference (distraction and interruption) were presented during the maintenance period to examine how they modulate brain activity profiles.

Brain activity patterns in stable and progressive mild cognitive impairment during working memory as evidenced by magnetoencephalography.

It has been reported that mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, when compared with controls, show increased activity in different brain regions within the ventral pathway during memory tasks. A key question is whether this profile of increased activity could be useful to predict which patients will develop dementia. Herein, we present profiles of brain magnetic activity during a memory task recorded with magnetoencephalography from MCI patients (N = 10), Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients (N = 10), and healthy volunteers (N = 17).

Increased biomagnetic activity in healthy elderly with subjective memory complaints.

Objective: Subjective memory complaints (SMCs) are frequently reported by elderly people with or without objective cognitive impairment (OMI) as assessed by neuropsychological tests. We investigate whether SMCs are associated with altered brain biomagnetic patterns even in the absence of OMI.

Methods: We report spatio-temporal patterns of brain magnetic activity recorded with magnetoencephalography during a memory task in 51 elderly participants divided into the following groups: patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with SMC and OMI, individuals with SMC but not OMI, and healthy controls without neither SMC nor OMI.

Retroactive interference in normal aging: a magnetoencephalography study.

Biomagnetic responses were recorded from healthy elderly subjects (55-67 years) performing a working memory task during recognition. The objective was to identify differential spatio-temporal brain activity patterns with magnetoencephalography by the presentation of two types of retroactive interference, active and passive. We obtained increased activity in the left medial temporal lobe and the left anterior ventral prefrontal cortex at early (100-200 ms) and medium latencies (300-400 ms) for the active interference group, and left anterior ventral prefrontal cortex showed greater activity at late latencies (700-800 ms) for the passive interference group.