Older adults rely increasingly on prior knowledge to make sense of their deteriorating representation of the visual world, but how this shapes scene perception and spatial reorientation remains unclear. To address this, 28 young and 25 older adults viewed artificially generated rooms either before or after learning the position of a gift hidden in an adjacent room. We manipulated both the number and the eccentricity of navigational affordances (i.e., open doors) to investigate the interaction between bottom-up scene features and top-down spatial knowledge. Consistent with previous findings, younger adults showed decreased performance as the number of open doors increased but only after learning the gift's position, indicating a top-down interaction with the automatic processing of affordances. Door eccentricity did not affect this interaction, suggesting our findings were not due to a distractor effect. In older adults, this interaction between prior spatial information and navigational affordances was markedly amplified: Reaction times increased at twice the rate observed in younger adults. These findings show that prior spatial knowledge interacts with the automatic extraction of navigational affordances, an influence markedly amplified with age. While prior knowledge helps stabilize perception when sensory processing becomes less reliable, it can also increase processing time for complex scenes, particularly when multiple navigation possibilities are present. By revealing how aging shifts the balance between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms, these results refine models of age-related navigation decline and highlight a trade-off whereby increased reliance on prior knowledge can negatively impact the interaction with complex environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Familiar activities may support memory in older adulthood by synchronizing neural processing during event encoding. To test this hypothesis, young and older adults watched videos of everyday activities that were either familiar or unfamiliar to their age group, while undergoing magnetic resonance imaging. After scanning, participants completed tests of their event memory. Older adults remembered less information than young adults in the young adult familiar activities. Contrary to our hypothesis, fMRI analyses showed that these deficits were not explained by age-related differences in vmPFC-hippocampal functional connectivity during encoding. Instead, intersubject correlation analyses revealed that older adults' poorer memory of unfamiliar videos was associated with reduced similarities in the spatiotemporal responses across viewers' at encoding. Specifically, young adults exhibited greater neural synchrony than older adults in occipital and ventral temporal cortices while viewing videos depicting activities more familiar to young adults. In contrast, age-related differences in synchrony were not observed for videos depicting activities more familiar to older adults. These findings indicate that familiarity promotes more similar neural processing across individuals and supports more normative event encoding in older adults when activities align with their prior experience.
Empathy, the ability to understand others' perspectives (cognitive empathy) and share their emotions (emotional empathy), is critical for social functioning across the lifespan. Although empathy changes with age and is often disrupted in neurodegenerative disease, prior research has largely examined isolated components or focused narrowly on healthy aging or specific disorders. This systematic review addresses this gap by synthesizing behavioral and neuroimaging evidence on empathy across typical and pathological aging, from healthy older adulthood and mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. We reviewed empirical studies published between January 2015 and October 2025 that examined cognitive and/or emotional empathy in healthy older adults or individuals with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, or behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. We propose an integrative model suggesting that cognitive and emotional empathy follow distinct trajectories across aging. Based on the model, cognitive empathy gradually declines, likely reflecting changes in prefrontal regions and large-scale brain networks, with this process beginning in normal aging and continuing through mild cognitive impairment and dementia. In contrast, emotional empathy is relatively preserved in aging and early disease stages, although it becomes more context-dependent with clearer impairment in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. We conclude that understanding these trajectories has important implications for early diagnosis, caregiving, and designing targeted interventions to support empathic functioning in older adults and individuals with neurodegenerative diseases.
