Our recent paper in Hippocampus on temporal discrimination in young and older adults recently got a great write up on Dr. Ryan Hunsaker’s blog, Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?
From the post:
Roberts and colleagues developed a task to test temporal pattern separation (as well as primacy and recency) in a cohort of young and aged adults. They were not only able to identify a clear pattern separation deficit in the temporal domain (which makes me very happy as I have been harping on their group to do so for quite a long time), but they also were able to identify successful and unsuccessful cognitive aging as well.
To me, the more important part of their work was that they developed a behavioral task that appears to be a rather sensitive marker for episodic memory deficits that emerge with age (at least the “when” component of episodic memory), and appears also to have a potential diagnostic value for early detection of age-related pathology. The authors obviously need to run a much larger cohort to see what individual differences exist in this task similar to their work with the behavioral pattern separation tasks (mnemonic discrimination tasks as now renamed), but it appears they are off to a great start.
Thanks for the buzz, Ryan! And a hearty congrats to Jared Roberts for the solid paper!