Reward Enhances Memory via Age-Varying Online and Offline Neural Mechanisms across Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reward motivation enhances memory through interactions between mesolimbic, hippocampal, and cortical systems, both during and after encoding. Developmental changes in these distributed neural circuits may lead to age-related differences in reward-motivated memory and the underlying neural mechanisms. Converging evidence from cross-species studies suggests that subcortical dopamine signaling is increased during adolescence, which may lead to stronger memory representations of rewarding, relative to mundane, events and changes in the contributions of underlying subcortical and cortical brain mechanisms across age. Here, we used fMRI to examine how reward motivation influences the “online” encoding and “offline” postencoding brain mechanisms that support long-term associative memory from childhood to adulthood in human participants of both sexes. We found that reward motivation led to both age-invariant enhancements and nonlinear age-related differences in associative memory after 24 h. Furthermore, reward-related memory benefits were linked to age-varying neural mechanisms. During encoding, interactions between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and ventral tegmental area (VTA) were associated with better high-reward memory to a greater degree with increasing age. Preencoding to postencoding changes in functional connectivity between the anterior hippocampus and VTA were also associated with better high-reward memory, but more so at younger ages. Our findings suggest that there may be developmental differences in the contributions of offline subcortical and online cortical brain mechanisms supporting reward-motivated memory. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT A substantial body of research has examined the neural mechanisms through which reward influences memory formation in adults. However, despite extensive evidence that both reward processing and associative memory undergo dynamic change across development, few studies have examined age-related changes in these processes. We found both age-invariant and nonlinear age-related differences in reward-motivated memory. Moreover, our findings point to developmental differences in the processes through which reward modulates the prioritization of information in long-term memory, with greater early reliance on offline subcortical consolidation mechanisms and increased contribution of systems-level online encoding circuitry with increasing age. These results highlight dynamic developmental changes in the cognitive and neural mechanisms through which motivationally salient information is prioritized in memory from childhood to adulthood.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".