ArticleeLife2023
Age-related differences in prefrontal glutamate are associated with increased working memory decay that gives the appearance of learning deficits.
Article in eLife, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- A systematic investigation reveals dissociable effects of ageing on implicit and explicit components of sensorimotor learning.Nature human behaviour · 2026Pooled it
- Neurometabolite abnormalities and associations with epilepsy duration and cognition in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsies.Epilepsia open · 2026Article
- A habit and working memory model as an alternative account of human reward-based learning.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- AI-enabled multimodal neuroimaging for neurotransmitter mapping in normal aging and age-related disease.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026Review
- Relationships between GABA + and Glx concentrations with age and inhibition in healthy older adults.Brain structure & function · 2025Article
- Dual process impairments in reinforcement learning and working memory systems underlie learning deficits in physiological anxiety.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Basal ganglia deep brain stimulation restores cognitive flexibility and exploration-exploitation balance disrupted by NMDA-R antagonism.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Hippocampal and prefrontal GABA and glutamate concentration contribute to component processes of working memory in aging.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Review
- Differential Aging Effects on Implicit and Explicit Sensorimotor Learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Artificial neural networks for model identification and parameter estimation in computational cognitive models.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Artificial neural networks for model identification and parameter estimation in computational cognitive models.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The ability to use past experience to effectively guide decision-making declines in older adulthood. Such declines have been theorized to emerge from either impairments of striatal reinforcement learning systems (RL) or impairments of recurrent networks in prefrontal and parietal cortex that support working memory (WM). Distinguishing between these hypotheses has been challenging because either RL or WM could be used to facilitate successful decision-making in typical laboratory tasks. Here we investigated the neurocomputational correlates of age-related decision-making deficits using an RL-WM task to disentangle these mechanisms, a computational model to quantify them, and magnetic resonance spectroscopy to link them to their molecular bases. Our results reveal that task performance is worse in older age, in a manner best explained by working memory deficits, as might be expected if cortical recurrent networks were unable to sustain persistent activity across multiple trials. Consistent with this, we show that older adults had lower levels of prefrontal glutamate, the excitatory neurotransmitter thought to support persistent activity, compared to younger adults. Individuals with the lowest prefrontal glutamate levels displayed the greatest impairments in working memory after controlling for other anatomical and metabolic factors. Together, our results suggest that lower levels of prefrontal glutamate may contribute to failures of working memory systems and impaired decision-making in older adulthood.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.