Study Finds Weaker Relationship Between What Older Adults See and Their Brain Activity

A study published in Neuropsychologia found a much weaker relationship between what the eyes see and brain activity among older adults, reports News-Medical . "Eye movements are important for gathering information from the world and the memory center of the brain — the hippocampus — is important for binding this data together to form a memory of what our eyes see," says Jennifer Ryan at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute. "But we found that older adults are not building up the memory in the same way as younger adults. Something is falling apart somewhere along the path of taking in visual information through the eyes and storing what is seen into a memory." The study involved 21 older adults between 64 and 79 and 20 younger adults between 19 and 28. Participants were briefly shown faces on a screen where some of the images were displayed multiple times. The team analyzed the eye movements and brain scans of individuals as they looked at and analyzed the images. Older adults exhibited greater eye movements, but did not have a corresponding pattern in brain activity. "These findings demonstrate that the eyes and brain are taking in information from their surroundings, but the linkage aspect of creating a memory appears to be broken," Ryan notes. "When the memory isn't being created, the object continues to remain unfamiliar to a person, even when they have seen it multiple times."