Abstract
With aging comes a myriad of different disorders, and cognitive decline is one of them. Studies have consistently shown a decline amongst aged subjects in their ability to acquire and maintain temporal associative memory. Defined as the memory of the association between two objects that are separated in time, temporal associative memory is dependent on neocortical structures such as the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe structures. For this memory to be acquired, a mental trace of the first stimulus is necessary to bridge the temporal gap so the two stimuli can be properly associated. Persistent firing, the ability of the neuron to continue to fire action potentials even after the termination of a triggering stimulus, is one mechanism that is posited to support this mental trace. A recent study demonstrated a decline in persistent firing ability in pyramidal neurons of layer III of the lateral entorhinal cortex with aging, contributing to learning impairments in temporal associative memory acquisition. In this work, we explore the potential ways persistent firing in lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) III supports temporal associative memory, and how aging may disrupt this mechanism within the temporal lobe system, resulting in impairment in this crucial behavior.
Highlights
Few things are as widely associated with aging as cognitive decline
The lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC)-medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) synchronization could reflect the mPFC taking over the role of mediating the conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditioned stimulus (US) association as it is consolidated into long-term memory, as well as the subsequent expression of memory (Figure 6)
To support the idea that cognitive reserve in older adults is dependent on an ability to recruit a more distributed neural network, Cabeza et al (2002) applied a low frequency stimulation to depress prefrontal activity during a memory encoding and retrieval task and found bilateral prefrontal recruitment compensating for local inhibition (Davis et al, 2017)
Summary
Defined as the memory of the association between two objects that are separated in time, temporal associative memory is dependent on neocortical structures such as the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe structures For this memory to be acquired, a mental trace of the first stimulus is necessary to bridge the temporal gap so the two stimuli can be properly associated. A recent study demonstrated a decline in persistent firing ability in pyramidal neurons of layer III of the lateral entorhinal cortex with aging, contributing to learning impairments in temporal associative memory acquisition. We explore the potential ways persistent firing in lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) III supports temporal associative memory, and how aging may disrupt this mechanism within the temporal lobe system, resulting in impairment in this crucial behavior
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