TY  - JOUR
AU  - Stangl, Matthias
AU  - Achtzehn, Johannes
AU  - Huber, Karin
AU  - Dietrich, Caroline
AU  - Tempelmann, Claus
AU  - Wolbers, Thomas
TI  - Compromised Grid-Cell-like Representations in Old Age as a Key Mechanism to Explain Age-Related Navigational Deficits.
JO  - Current biology
VL  - 28
IS  - 7
SN  - 0960-9822
CY  - London
PB  - Current Biology Ltd.
M1  - DZNE-2020-06209
SP  - 1108-1115.e6
PY  - 2018
AB  - A progressive loss of navigational abilities in old age has been observed in numerous studies, but we have only limited understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying this decline [1]. A central component of the brain's navigation circuit are grid cells in entorhinal cortex [2], largely thought to support intrinsic self-motion-related computations, such as path integration (i.e., keeping track of one's position by integrating self-motion cues) [3-6]. Given that entorhinal cortex is particularly vulnerable to neurodegenerative processes during aging and Alzheimer's disease [7-14], deficits in grid cell function could be a key mechanism to explain age-related navigational decline. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments in healthy young and older adults. First, in an fMRI experiment, we found significantly reduced grid-cell-like representations in entorhinal cortex of older adults. Second, in a behavioral path integration experiment, older adults showed deficits in computations of self-position during path integration based on body-based or visual self-motion cues. Most strikingly, we found that these path integration deficits in older adults could be explained by their individual magnitudes of grid-cell-like representations, as reduced grid-cell-like representations were associated with larger path integration errors. Together, these results show that grid-cell-like representations in entorhinal cortex are compromised in healthy aging. Furthermore, the association between grid-cell-like representations and path integration performance in old age supports the notion that grid cells underlie path integration processes. We therefore conclude that impaired grid cell function may play a key role in age-related decline of specific higher-order cognitive functions, such as spatial navigation.
KW  - Adult
KW  - Aged
KW  - Aging: pathology
KW  - Cognition: physiology
KW  - Entorhinal Cortex: physiology
KW  - Female
KW  - Grid Cells: physiology
KW  - Humans
KW  - Male
KW  - Spatial Memory: physiology
KW  - Spatial Navigation: physiology
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:29551413
C2  - pmc:PMC5887108
DO  - DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2018.02.038
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/139887
ER  -