Individual Differences in Resting-State Salience Connectivity and Emotional Memory in the Cam-CAN Dataset

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Michael DiCalogero¹ (mjd499@drexel.edu), Meghan D. Caulfield², Irene P. Kan³, Evangelia G. Chrysikou¹; ¹Drexel University, ²Seton Hall University, ³Villanova University

Aging research reveals that older adults show declining cognitive functions in various domains, including memory. These changes in cognition are reflected in changes within large-scale brain networks, such as the salience, default mode, and executive control networks. Recent research has revealed an association between resting-state functional connectivity of the salience network and recognition memory in younger adults, as well as preserved structural and functional connectivity for the salience network in ‘Superagers’- older adults resilient to cognitive decline. Based on this prior work, the present study takes an adult lifespan approach and examines how individual differences in salience network connectivity may be associated with memory performance. We used existing data from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) dataset. This dataset includes 330 participants (between 18 and 88 years of age), who completed an emotional memory task, as well as underwent structural and functional MRI scans. The emotional memory task consisted of 120 encoding trials where participants saw a neutral object superimposed on a positive, negative, or neutral background. For recognition trials, participants were tested on 160 objects to assess object recognition and background valence. Functional MRI data were pre-processed using SP8 and functional connectivity toolbox (CONN) pipelines. Statistical analysis within CONN revealed that individual differences in salience network connectivity as a factor of age might be able to predict emotional memory performance. These findings underscore the relationship between salience network connectivity and emotional memory, and highlight the importance of examining salience network contributions to memory across the lifespan.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging