Medial temporal lobe BOLD activity at rest predicts individual differences in memory ability in healthy young adults

Human beings differ in their ability to form and retrieve lasting long-term memories. To explore the source of these individual differences, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity in healthy young adults (n = 50) during periods of restin...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 105; no. 47; pp. 18555 - 18560
Main Authors Wig, Gagan S, Grafton, Scott T, Demos, Kathryn E, Wolford, George L, Petersen, Steven E, Kelley, William M
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 25.11.2008
National Acad Sciences
Subjects
Adolescent
Adult
Behavioral neuroscience
Biological Sciences
Blood
Cognitive ability
Female
Hippocampus
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Memory
Mnemonics
NMR
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Oxygen
Oxygen - blood
Physiology
Prefrontal cortex
Principal components analysis
Reference Values
Resting periods
Temporal lobe
Temporal Lobe - physiology
Young adults
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Summary:Human beings differ in their ability to form and retrieve lasting long-term memories. To explore the source of these individual differences, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity in healthy young adults (n = 50) during periods of resting fixation that were interleaved with periods of simple cognitive tasks. We report that medial temporal lobe BOLD activity during periods of rest predicts individual differences in memory ability. Specifically, individuals who exhibited greater magnitudes of task-induced deactivations in medial temporal lobe BOLD signal (as compared to periods of rest) demonstrated superior memory during offline testing. This relationship was independent of differences in general cognitive function and persisted across different control tasks (i.e., number judgment versus checkerboard detection) and experimental designs (i.e., blocked versus event-related). These results offer a neurophysiological basis for the variability in mnemonic ability that is present amongst healthy young adults and may help to guide strategies aimed at early detection and intervention of neurological and mnemonic impairment.
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Author contributions: G.S.W., S.T.G., S.E.P., and W.M.K. designed research; G.S.W. and K.E.D. performed research; G.S.W. and G.L.W. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; G.S.W., K.E.D., and G.L.W. analyzed data; and G.S.W. and W.M.K. wrote the paper.
2Present Address: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Edited by Marcus E. Raichle, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, and approved October 3, 2008
3Present Address: Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.0804546105