Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Pablo Ezequiel Flores Kanter | email: pflores@itba.edu.ar
Pablo Ezequiel Flores-Kanter 1°2°, Matias Bonilla 1°2°, Vanessa Vidal 1°, Luis I Brusco 2°3°, Cecilia Forcato 1°2°
1° Laboratorio de Sueño y Memoria, Departamento de Ciencias de la Vida, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
2° Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
3° CENECON. Centro de Neuropsiquiatría y Neurología de la Conducta (CENECON), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Memory is a dynamic process that can be modulated by different factors. In addition to age, emotional variables (e.g. anxiety, depression, and stress) impact memory formation. During COVID-19 pandemic these emotional variables increased, being young adults the most affected. This has given rise to Bonilla et al. (2022) hypothesizing that young adults would present a greater deterioration in episodic memory compared to older adults, being the latter less affected by the pandemic. These authors evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic a lower performance in young adults in aversive episodic memory encoding compared to older adults. In the present study, we deepened the analyzes of Bonilla et al. (2022), reanalyzing the data obtained through network analysis using graph modeling. These measurements may reveal emergent system properties only visible when the network is considered as a whole. Thus, this work aimed to (a) compare the structure of the memory network between young and older adults; and (b) compare the network analysis with the conventional analysis used to reveal episodic memory deficits. The results showed that the structures of the semantic networks presented a deterioration in the narrative in healthy older adults, typical of aging. These data complement the initial results described in Bonilla et al. (2022) and report the applicability and relevance of network modeling for the analysis of episodic memories in natural language.