Greater age‐related cognitive decline in perceptual discrimination of objects than scenes: A cross‐cultural study

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundAccording to the “PMAT” framework, two distinct cortico‐hippocampal networks – the posterior‐medial (PM) and anterior‐temporal (AT) networks – are involved in the processing of scene and object content respectively (Ranganath & Ritchey, 2012). It has been suggested that aging predominantly affects the AT network (Berron et al., 2018), and recent studies show evidence for early impairment in object relative to scene mnemonic discrimination with age (Reagh et al., 2016; Gusten et al., 2021). Age‐dependent impairments in object discrimination even exist outside the realm of episodic memory tasks, such as in perceptual oddity tasks (Graham et al., 2010). We aim to extend these findings with i) a digital Oddity perceptual discrimination task, and ii) a cross‐cultural sample.MethodWe tested healthy participants in the UK (n = 141) and India (n = 149) aged between 18‐70 years on a novel multi‐category Oddity discrimination task including object and scene categories. Using a combined speed‐accuracy measure, Inverse Efficiency Score (IES), we applied a mixed‐effects modelling approach to analyse the age trajectory of performance across categories.ResultsWe found a significant decline in performance with age across stimulus categories and cultures, and object performance showed a significantly steeper decline than scenes in both cultures.ConclusionThese findings are amongst the first to indicate that the Oddity discrimination task is sensitive and specific to age‐related cognitive decline across cultures. Notably, these findings support the idea that the object/ AT network is more sensitive to age (potentially reflecting tau pathology) than the scene/ PM network (Berron et al., 2020). Therefore, perceptual discrimination tasks may be a promising cross‐cultural assessment tool for the early detection and differential diagnosis of patterns of age‐related cognitive decline.