Abstract
Normal aging involves changes in the ability to acquire, consolidate and recall new information. It has been recently proposed that the reconsolidation process is also affected in older adults. Reconsolidation is triggered after reminder presentation, allowing memories to be modified: they can be impaired, strengthened or changed in their content. In young adults it was previously shown that the presentation of repetitive reminders induces memory strengthening one day after reactivation and the presentation of at least one reminder increases memory persistence several days after reactivation. However, until now this process has remained elusive in older adults. We hypothesize that older adults need a stronger reminder to induce memory strengthening through the reconsolidation process than young adults. To test this, we perform a three-day experiment. On day 1, participants learned 15 sound-word associations, on day 2 they received no reminders (NR group), one reminder (R group) or two rounds of reactivations (Rx2 group). Finally, they were tested on day 7. We found that, contrary to our hypothesis, older adults show a memory improvement triggered by repeated labilization/reconsolidation processes to an equal extent than young adults. These results open new perspectives into the use of reconsolidation to improve daily acquired information and the development of therapeutic home used tools to produce memory enhancement in healthy older adults or those with cognitive decline.
Highlights
Memories are dynamic and they change through time
They found that if they analyzed the type of error at testing on day 3, there was a reduction of the confusion type error for the group that received two reactivations compared to the other two groups [18]
There was no significant interaction between age and reminder condition
Summary
Memories are dynamic and they change through time. One of the processes that allow this modification is reconsolidation. Memory reconsolidation in elderly restabilization period dependent on protein synthesis and gene expression [1, 2] This process is not unique to humans, it is conserved across species [3,4,5] and it is involved in different kinds of memories [6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. If subjects were tested on day 7 memory strengthening was observed for the group that received only one reminder [19] They found that if they analyzed the type of error at testing on day 3, there was a reduction of the confusion type error (when participants mixed the letters of a syllable or they wrote a syllable that did not exist on the list) for the group that received two reactivations compared to the other two groups [18]. Repeated reconsolidation processes could enhance memory precision and memory persistence
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