Brain representations of visual short-term memories during healthy human aging: occipital decline and frontoparietal compensation

In 115 adults (25–87) from the Cam-CAN cohort, fMRI decoding of remembered motion direction in visual cortex weakens with age and load, mediating age-related performance decline.

• Why it matters: Visual short-term memory declines with age, but how neural representations of the remembered content change—and how that relates to performance—was unclear.
• What they did: Using fMRI decoding, motion-direction representations were tested in visual and frontoparietal cortex across memory load and age, and their links to performance were assessed, including mediation and age-varying coupling.
• The result: The coupling between visual representations and performance decline weakened with age, with some older adults showing stronger visual representations than performance predicted, while frontoparietal representations strengthened with age during maintenance.

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