Does functional system segregation mediate the effects of lifestyle on cognition in older adults?

Healthy aging is typically accompanied by cognitive decline. Previous work has shown that engaging in multiple, non-work activities during midlife can have a protective effect on cognition several decades later, rendering it less dependent on brain structural health; the definition of "cognitive reserve". Other work has shown that increasing age is associated with reduced segregation of large-scale brain functional networks.

False memories for ending of events.

Memories are not perfect recordings of the past and can be subject to systematic biases. Memory distortions are often caused by our experience of what typically happens in a given situation. However, it is unclear whether memory for events is biased by the knowledge that events usually have a predictable structure (a beginning, middle, and an end).

The Importance of Semantic Network Brain Regions in Integrating Prior Knowledge with an Ongoing Dialogue.

To understand a dialogue, we need to know the topics that are being discussed. This enables us to integrate our knowledge of what was said previously to interpret the current dialogue. This study involved a large-scale behavioral experiment conducted online and a separate fMRI experiment, both testing human participants.

The Neural Representation of Events Is Dominated by Elements that Are Most Reliably Present.

An episodic memory is specific to an event that occurred at a particular time and place. However, the elements that constitute the event-the location, the people present, and their actions and goals-might be shared with numerous other similar events. Does the brain preferentially represent certain elements of a remembered event? If so, which elements dominate its neural representation: those that are shared across similar events, or the novel elements that define a specific event? We addressed these questions by using a novel experimental paradigm combined with fMRI.

Activation of Person Knowledge in Medial Prefrontal Cortex during the Encoding of New Lifelike Events.

Our knowledge about people can help us predict how they will behave in particular situations and interpret their actions. In this study, we investigated the cognitive and neural effects of person knowledge on the encoding and retrieval of novel life-like events. Healthy human participants learnt about two characters over a week by watching 6 episodes of one of two situation comedies, which were both centered on a young couple.

The brain regions supporting schema-related processing of people's identities.

Schematic knowledge about people helps us to understand their behaviour in novel situations. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and hippocampus play important, yet poorly understood, roles in schema-based processing. Here, we manipulated schematic knowledge by familiarizing participants over the course of a week to the two lead characters of one of two TV shows.