Performance on pattern recogniton declins with age while performance on pattern separation does not

• Main Author: Schnell, Felizia
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap 2015
• Subjects: Pattern separation; Pattern recognition; Hippocampus; Episodic memory; Dentate gyrus; Human Computer Interaction; Människa-datorinteraktion (interaktionsdesign)
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-119619

This report aims to explore if pattern recognition and pattern separation tasks performance degenerate with age. This as there are studies by Brickman et al. (2014) that suggest that these tasks are being performed by the hippocampus in particular, the dentate gyrus part. The tasks used in this report were replicated from a study in which it was assumed that they tested this parts. As both the hippocampus and the dentate gyrus supposedly degenerate with age, the tasks tested this degeneration by looking if the participant’s performance on the tasks changed with age. The performance on the pattern separation task did not change with age while the pattern recognition task did. This preservation of pattern separation might mean that the pattern separation tasks does not measure the dentate gyrus. It might also mean that the hippocampus might not degenerate as previously assumed or that the pattern separation task really test the hippocampus.