# Aging Memory

> **NIH NIH R01** · HARVARD UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $537,011

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
This is the fifth renewal of a longstanding project focused on age-related declines in the ability to remember
specific past personal experiences, commonly referred to episodic memory. Episodic memory plays an
important role in supporting adaptive cognitive functions that require the ability to retrieve and flexibly
recombine episodic information, such as imagining novel future experiences or making inferences that link
distinct events. However, cognitive aging research has only recently begun to examine the consequences of
episodic memory decline for these adaptive functions. Several studies, for example, have documented that
reduced episodic retrieval in healthy older adults and patients with Alzheimer's disease is associated with
declines in imagining details about future experiences (episodic simulation). Functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) studies have revealed that episodic simulation is associated with a core brain network that
includes medial prefrontal, temporal, and parietal cortices as well as lateral temporal and parietal cortices, but
little is known about how age-associated changes in episodic simulation are related to the functions of specific
regions within this core network. The main goals of the proposed research are to use both neuroimaging and
cognitive/behavioral paradigms to identify the effects of aging on the neural mechanisms and cognitive
consequences of episodic processes involved in recombining elements of past experiences to construct novel
event representations. The first set of experiments will test hypotheses regarding the effects of aging on the
neural mechanisms that support flexible recombination of episodic details when participants imagine novel
future experiences by applying new fMRI paradigms and procedures developed in recent research: 1) an
episodic specificity induction that increases the generation of episodic details during future imagining in both
old and young adults; 2) an analytic procedure that allows the identification of core network regions as a
function of the timecourse of their engagement during simulation and the amount of information that is
simulated; and 3) a novel repetition suppression procedure that has documented that particular core network
regions demonstrate repetition-related reductions in neural activity that are linked with specific components of
simulated events. The second set of experiments will examine the effects of aging on cognitive consequences of
flexible recombination using a new procedure that provides evidence for a link between flexible recombination
processes used to make associative inferences about the relations among distinct events and subsequent
memory distortions. Several experiments have shown that young adults commit more source memory errors
after successful than unsuccessful associative inferences, but preliminary data indicate that older adults do not
show this effect. The proposed experiments will explore the conditions...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10073460
- **Project number:** 5R01AG008441-29
- **Recipient organization:** HARVARD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Daniel L Schacter
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $537,011
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1989-08-04 → 2022-11-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10073460

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10073460, Aging Memory (5R01AG008441-29). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10073460. Licensed CC0.

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