Menopause status- and sex-related differences in age associations with spatial context memory and white matter microstructure at midlife.

Decline in spatial context memory emerges in midlife, the time when most females transition from pre- to post-menopause. Recent evidence suggests that, among post-menopausal females, advanced age is associated with functional brain alterations and lower spatial context memory. However, it is unknown whether similar effects are evident for white matter (WM) and, moreover, whether such effects contribute to sex differences at midlife.

Take a load off: examining partial and complete cognitive offloading of medication information.

Although cognitive offloading, or the use of physical action to reduce internal cognitive demands, is a commonly used strategy in everyday life, relatively little is known about the conditions that encourage offloading and the memorial consequences of different offloading strategies for performance. Much of the extant work in this domain has focused on laboratory-based tasks consisting of word lists, letter strings, or numerical stimuli and thus makes little contact with real-world scenarios under which engaging in cognitive offloading might be likely. Accordingly, the current work examines offloading choice behavior and potential benefits afforded by offloading health-related information.

Strenuous Exercise Habits and Spatial Mnemonic Discrimination Ability in Young Adult Men and Women.

Increased physical activity has shown positive effects on various hippocampal memory functions through accumulating evidence that physical exercise and higher cardiorespiratory fitness can enhance human performance on nonspatial mnemonic discrimination tasks that rely on hippocampal pattern separation. However, there is less direct evidence of exercise effects on spatial pattern separation in humans, despite evidence for this association in rodent models. We examined the influence of strenuous exercise habits on spatial mnemonic discrimination among 176 young adults.