Does the aging brain lose its specialisation for scenes and faces?
Older adults' scene-processing regions responded less selectively than younger adults', but their face-processing regions did not, and scene selectivity predicted memory equally at any age.
Source
Neural Differentiation is Moderated by Age in Scene-Selective, But Not Face-Selective, Cortical Regions
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Younger vs older adults compared during fMRI while encoding word-face and word-scene pairs for a later source memory test; neural selectivity in two scene-selective and two face-selective regions measured by a univariate differentiation index and multivoxel pattern similarity.
- N
- The provided text omits the Participants and study-phase sections, so the number of younger and older adults is not stated; analyses compare two age groups.
- Population
- Healthy younger and older adults (men and women) matched on education and MMSE
- Outcome
- Category selectivity (differentiation index and within-minus-between pattern similarity) in PPA, RSC, FFA and OFA; item and source memory
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What they did
Younger and older adults were scanned while they studied words each paired with a picture of a face or a scene, then later judged whether words were old and, if so, which kind of picture had accompanied them. The researchers measured how selectively two scene regions (parahippocampal place area and retrosplenial cortex) and two face regions (fusiform and occipital face areas) responded to their preferred category, using both an average-signal index and a multivoxel pattern-similarity index. They repeated the analyses using only trials later remembered correctly, to rule out differences caused by older adults remembering less.
What they found
Both selectivity measures agreed: older adults showed reduced differentiation in both scene regions, with large effects in the parahippocampal place area (d = 1.355) and retrosplenial cortex (d = 1.086), but no age difference in either face region. The age effect in scene regions came from weaker responses to scenes plus stronger responses to faces. Across both age groups, greater selectivity in the parahippocampal place area went with better source memory (partial r = 0.334 after controlling for age), and this relation did not differ by age. A previously reported link between scene selectivity and a verbal fluency factor did not replicate.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The design is cross-sectional, so the age differences could reflect cohort or other confounds rather than aging itself, as the authors note. The extracted text omits the participant section, so group sizes and recruitment details cannot be checked here. Category-level selectivity may be too coarse to detect age differences in how precisely individual faces are represented, and the authors cannot tell why faces were spared (colour images, active task, event-related design and different encoding strategies are all candidate explanations). The memory link is correlational and appeared only for the univariate measure, not the pattern-similarity measure.
Key terms
- Neural dedifferentiation
- An age-related loss of selectivity in which brain regions that normally respond strongly to one category (such as scenes) respond more similarly to different categories.
- Parahippocampal place area (PPA)
- A region of ventral temporal cortex that responds more to scenes and places than to faces or objects.
- Fusiform face area (FFA)
- A region of the fusiform gyrus that responds more strongly to faces than to other visual categories.
- Differentiation index
- The difference between a region's average response to its preferred and non-preferred category, divided by their pooled standard deviation.
- Pattern similarity analysis
- A multivoxel method that compares how alike the activity patterns are for trials of the same category versus different categories.
- Source memory
- Memory for the context in which an item was learned, here whether a word had been paired with a face or a scene.
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Quiz yourself
In which regions did older adults show reduced neural differentiation?
Common questions
Why analyse only correctly remembered trials as well as all trials?
Younger adults remembered more, so an all-trials comparison mixes different proportions of successful encoding across groups. Restricting to source-correct trials gave the same age effect in scene regions, so the effect is not just a memory-mix artefact.
Was dedifferentiation caused by weaker scene responses or stronger face responses?
Both. In scene regions older adults responded less to scenes and more to faces, a mix of attenuation and broadening.
If selectivity predicts memory at every age, what does that imply?
Selectivity seems to reflect a general individual difference linked to memory rather than something that only matters in old age; age lowers the average, but the brain-memory relation itself is age-invariant.
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