Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

As the global population becomes increasingly old, a major imperative exists to pinpoint mechanisms of cognitive decline associated with ageing. Working memory (WM) and decision-making (DM) are fundamental building blocks of cognition that deteriorate with age. Recent computational and empirical studies suggest a shared neural circuit mechanism may underpin both processes. The present study leverages this emerging, integrative framework to interrogate sources of decline in WM and DM accuracy associated with age. Young and older adults completed psychophysical tasks designed to parse sources of shared and unique variance in WM and DM behaviour while scalp EEG was recorded. Results from both modalities, informed by analyses of noise and bias in WM and DM reports and decoding of EEG signals, converged to suggest a primary locus of age-related dysfunction - degraded sensory encoding - that gives rise to a specific pattern of decline across both domains.