Neuralmechanism Of Executive And Operational Function Of Working Memory In Elderly

Working memory is a kind of system which contains short storage,maintenance and operation of information.This system is very important in daily life,and it is a significant part of cognitive processing.With the growing population aging of the world,cognitive aging has gradually become a new research hotspot.In the study of cognitive aging,working memory aging is one of the hot topics.As an important index to measure brain function,cognitive function has a significant impact on the daily life of the elderly.this research includes two experiments.First of all,in experiment 1,we used digital memory positive order,reverse order paradigm and its variant,digital ranking,to investigate the age difference of neural mechanism of three tasks and the change of brain area activation among those three tasks.Then in experiment 2,we used the digital Stroop paradigm with acute aerobic exercise interventions in order to investigate age differences between coherence and conflict tasks before and after acute aerobic exercise.and figure out the changes in brain area activation between different tasks,the most important is we need to investigate the effect of acute aerobic exercise on the neural mechanisms of executive function in working memory.The subjects was college students under 30 years old and the elderly was over 55 years old.The results indicated that(1)in the study of storage,maintenance and operation function of working memory aging,the elderly appeared bilateral symmetrical activation of the brain,while the brain activation pattern of young people tended to be unilateral.HAROLD model was partially validated in this study,while confirming the controversy over the HAROLD model,that is,the difficulty and complexity of the task have an effect on brain activation in the elderly,and it is obvious for elderly in the unilateral activation of the simple task.(2)Overactivation of the prefrontal cortex may mean functional compensation,with older persons relying prefrontal cortex heavily in storage,maintenance and operation tasks of working memory,while young people's processing mechanisms are dominated by the lateral prefrontal lobe,when task difficulty increases,the prefrontal lobe is required to cognitive processing.(3)Acute aerobic exercise contributes to improving cognitive performance and activation of brain area in the elderly.The prefrontal pole of the elderly is sensitive to exercise and the left lateral prefrontal lobe is associated with working memory executive function.(4)The results support the theory of dedifferentiation and functional compensation in the prefrontal cortex,but this compensation is not specific to aging.