BIO

My name is Faith Hicks. I'm from Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm a senior majoring in Psychology with a minor in child development. I am currently working on a DIS in the Martin Memory Lab, and am very interested in human memory and cognitive psychology.

The Neural Basis of Face Recognition in Older Adults

Abstract

The ability to recognize a personally familiar face, such as a loved one, is a cognitive function used in everyday life. However, adults diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) experience an impairment of this ability, which contributes to the negative impact AD has on quality of life. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to characterize differences in neural activity related to face recognition in older adults with and without indications of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a clinical precursor to AD. More specifically, we examine differences in brain activity evoked by recognition of personally familiar faces, experimentally familiar faces of strangers, and novel faces of strangers. Participants used a digital camera to capture standardized images of people with whom they are personally familiar (i.e., spouses, children, close friends). Experimentally familiar faces were learned in a series of lab-based encoding tasks. All participants were asked to discriminate between the three categories of faces (personally familiar, experimentally familiar, and novel) during functional neuroimaging. We will use a pattern-based similarity analysis to quantify representational change among recognition signals for the different faces. We anticipate that recognition in cognitively healthy older adults will be characterized by brain activity that reliably differentiates between each stimulus category, whereas people with MCI will show a restricted representational space such that faces from all categories evoke similar activity patterns. If obtained, this difference between cognitively healthy aging adults and those with MCI would help us to determine a key neural system impacted during AD progression.

Keywords: fMRI study, facial recognition, human memory