60,79 The segmentation of the frontal cortex by neuroscientists into specific sites associated with inhibition, storage, and conflict, #selleck bio randurls[1|1|,|CHEM1|]# resolution have resulted in changes in the focus of behavioral work away from general explanatory constructs into more focused, operationbased views of age-related changes in cognitive function. Age-related declines in long-term memory have the added complexity of involvement of mediotemporal areas. There is only a weak relationship between mediotemporal volume and cognitive performance41 and relatively little functional evidence Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical relating hippocampal dysfunction to memory dysfunction in normal older adults – although there

arc few studies of this with age.55 Moreover, the entorhinal cortex appears to be important for understanding Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical both normal and pathological aging.80 In general, most evidence accounting for age-related declines in long-term memory function have focused on encoding and retrieval operations residing in the frontal cortex, although there is clear evidence that, mediotemporal function is important for long-term memory function in young adults. There is certainly sufficient

evidence to suggest that prefrontal cortex plays a causal role in contributing to age-related changes in behavioral tasks of executive function and Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical long-term memory. What Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical is poorly understood is the specific relationship of neural activation patterns to cognitive aging, an issue taken up later in this article. Behavioral researchers may find it productive to focus their work in cognitive aging on specific

executive processes and operations to understand changes in memory and higher order functions, as these operations better reflect neural architecture. Continuous cognitive decline across life span Dopamine receptors decline Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical continuously across the life span and may play a role in the gradual decline of cognitive ability, along with volumetric declines in frontal cortex. Although there is considerable confusion about, patterns of neural recruitment in old and young, there are some broad generalizations that are reasonably well substantiated about the asymmetry of hemispheric recruitment in young compared with older adults.48 What, remains entirely unexplored is how young adults make GSK-3 the transition from highly focused, latcralized activations in performing a cognitive operation, to the qualitatively dedifferentiated patterns of recruitment observed in older adults. The disconnect between continuous behavioral decline and qualitatively different recruitment patterns with age can only be understood by conducting large life span neuroimaging studies with attention to individual differences in both behavioral and neural domains as well as age.