Abstract
Several neuroimaging studies of cognitive aging revealed deficits in episodic memory abilities as a result of prefrontal cortex (PFC) limitations. Improving episodic memory performance despite PFC deficits is thus a critical issue in aging research. Listening to music stimulates cognitive performance in several non-purely musical activities (e.g., language and memory). Thus, music could represent a rich and helpful source during verbal encoding and therefore help subsequent retrieval. Furthermore, such benefit could be reflected in less demand of PFC, which is known to be crucial for encoding processes. This study aimed to investigate whether music may improve episodic memory in older adults while decreasing the PFC activity. Sixteen healthy older adults (μ = 64.5 years) encoded lists of words presented with or without a musical background while their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activity was monitored using a eight-channel continuous-wave near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system (Oxymon Mk III, Artinis, The Netherlands). Behavioral results indicated a better source-memory performance for words encoded with music compared to words encoded with silence (p < 0.05). Functional NIRS data revealed bilateral decrease of oxyhemoglobin values in the music encoding condition compared to the silence condition (p < 0.05), suggesting that music modulates the activity of the DLPFC during encoding in a less-demanding direction. Taken together, our results indicate that music can help older adults in memory performances by decreasing their PFC activity. These findings open new perspectives about music as tool for episodic memory rehabilitation on special populations with memory deficits due to frontal lobe damage such as Alzheimer’s patients.
Highlights
Research in cognitive aging has reported that older adults often present declines in specific memory systems (Tulving, 1972)
Based on previous results with young adults (Ferreri et al, 2013), the present study aimed to investigate the neural mechanisms involved in memory–music processes, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to monitor cortical response during the encoding phase among older adults, who usually show impairment in prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity and episodic memory tasks
Our fNIRS results showed that the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was activated (O2Hb increase and HHb decrease) during the verbal www.frontiersin.org encoding phase in the silence condition
Summary
Research in cognitive aging has reported that older adults often present declines in specific memory systems (Tulving, 1972). Episodic memory can be defined as the type of awareness experienced when one thinks back to a specific moment in one’s personal past and consciously recollects some prior episode or as it was previously experienced. This special kind of awareness is identifiable in all healthy and human adults (Wheeler et al, 1997). Several studies have shown that healthy aging is often characterized by reduced access to contextually specific episodic memory details, resulting in larger deficits in sourcememory performance than in item-memory performance (Craik et al, 1990; Glisky et al, 1995; Spencer and Raz, 1995; Dennis et al, 2008). Older adults have difficulty remembering specific information about the circumstances under which an event was encountered, and they are less likely to remember the contextual features of events correctly (Johnson et al, 1993; Dodson et al, 2007), which can be considered to be a deficit in the ability to encode the spatio-temporal context of an event (Parkin and Walter, 1992; Bugaiska et al, 2007)
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