Electrophysiological investigation of episodic memory in aging

This review deals with event-related potentials contribution for the study of episodic memory aging. Episodic memory enables individuals to consciously remember their personally experienced past and is one of the most affected cognitive functions in aging. Event-related potentials provide extremely useful information about neural bases of age-related memory deficits. Thus, this electrophysiological technique allows the impact of aging on cognitive processes to be explored with an exquisite temporal precision. Data reveal age-related differences in the electrophysiological patterns associated with encoding and retrieval operations in episodic memory. Moreover, observations with this method suggest that increasing age is associated with cerebral reorganization mechanisms. Lastly, some individual characteristics appear to modulate age effects on electrophysiological correlates of episodic memory.