GoKawiilStudy finds aging hippocampus blends separate memories rather than erasing them
Researchers scanning brains of adults aged 18 to 74 found that memory accuracy for face-object and face-scene pairings dropped sharply after young adulthood, with middle-aged and older participants performing similarly rather than declining gradually. In older adults, the same hippocampal activity patterns that supported accurate recall in younger people were instead linked to cross-category errors, such as confusing a scene with an object. The study, published in Cerebral Cortex, found that brain shrinkage and attention differences did not fully explain this shift.