Abstract:
Even healthy aging is associated with neurocognitive changes, yet, affective processing remains relatively intact. I will present a line of work focused on these preserved affective processes and how they may contribute to improved cognitive function in older adults. Specifically, through a combination of behavioral and neuroimaging studies, we have found that older adults are still sensitive to monetary rewards, they engage the reward network to the same extent as younger adults, and that motivational incentives can improve older adults performance on memory tasks. These findings suggest the preserved reward motivation may allow the continued ability to flexibly allocate cognitive resources that prioritize high value information as we age, and may have implications for cognitive and pharmacological interventions.