What this means
Visual short-term memory declines steeply with age, but the link to neural representations of memory content remains unknown. We used fMRI decoding to relate remembered motion-direction representations in visual and frontoparietal cortex to age and performance, in 115 adults, aged 25-87, from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) cohort.
A plain-English summary is on its way. Until then, this is the start of the authors' own summary.
- Who it was tested in
- Not stated
- Kind of research
- Early results, not yet checked by other scientists
The science
- Original title
- Brain representations of visual short-term memories during healthy human aging: occipital decline and frontoparietal compensation
- Authors
- Mitchell, D. J., Cam-CAN,, Cusack, R.
- Journal
- bioRxiv (preprint, not yet peer reviewed)
- Published
- Oct 30, 2026
- Study type
- Preprint
Abstract
Visual short-term memory declines steeply with age, but the link to neural representations of memory content remains unknown. We used fMRI decoding to relate remembered motion-direction representations in visual and frontoparietal cortex to age and performance, in 115 adults, aged 25-87, from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) cohort. Decoding was strongest in visual cortex, but also significant in frontoparietal regions, with different profiles. Visual representations weakened with memory load and age, and statistically mediated age-related performance decline, especially during recall. This coupling, however, weakened with age: some older adults retained stronger visual representations than performance implied, suggesting impaired access to a partially preserved memory trace. Frontoparietal representations, instead, were largely insensitive to load and strengthened with age during maintenance, partially offsetting performance decline. Therefore, interventions to boost VSTM in older adults might target compensatory frontoparietal representations during memory maintenance, and readout of untapped visual representations at recall.
Mitchell, D. J., Cam-CAN,, Cusack, R. Brain representations of visual short-term memories during healthy human aging: occipital decline and frontoparietal compensation. bioRxiv. 2026. doi:10.64898/2026.10.26.761884. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.10.26.761884