This chapter reviews research on social cognition and age. This covers self-focused processes, including self-referencing and memory as well as own-age bias and stereotype threat and stigma. Processes focused on other people are also reviewed, including moral judgment, empathy, theory of mind, social interactions and impression formation, memory for impressions, and trust.

This chapter reviews findings about the structural changes to the brain, considering effects on both gray matter and white matter and relationships between these measures and behavior. It also reviews research on changes with age to the connectivity of the brain and the default mode network. Findings related to effects of aging on perception and sensation as well as neurotransmitters are presented. The chapter ends with extensive coverage of individual difference factors, including genetic influences, intelligence, cognitive reserve, bilingualism, personality, and stress.

This chapter reviews theories of cognitive aging, considering how those classic theories intersect with those informed by cognitive neuroscience methods. The chapter also reviews cognitive neuroscience methods, reviewing methods to study the structural integrity of the brain as well as those used to investigate brain function or the ways in which multiple measures can be combined. The chapter ends with discussion of recent methodological advances, including multivariate analysis methods and the study of beta-amyloid and tau.

This chapter reviews research on the effects of age on emotion as well as decision making. After reviewing the neural regions involved in emotion, the chapter delves into the topics of emotion identification, emotion regulation, life satisfaction, socioemotional selectivity theory, and emotion and memory. Turning to the research on decision making and reward, the chapter considers how age affects brain activity during tasks involving reward, economic decisions, and gambling. It also discusses economic decision making in a social context and future directions in motivation research.

Section 10.1 discusses patients with aMCI. These patients have long-term memory deficits due to atrophy of medial temporal lobe regions. Within a few years of being diagnosed with aMCI, about half of these individuals are diagnosed with AD, the topic of Section 10.2. Section 10.3 focuses on patients with mTBI, who typically perform normally on working memory tasks but have increased fMRI activity within the lateral prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex. In Section 10.4, patients with mTLE are considered. These patients can elect to have a region in their medial temporal lobe removed to reduce the frequency of their seizures. Section 10.5 discusses patients with TGA; these patients have a sudden onset of amnesia that lasts for less than 24 hours and is caused by a small temporary lesion to a specific subregion of the hippocampus.

Section 9.1 reviews the brain regions that have been associated with attention, which include sensory processing regions in addition to lateral prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex control regions. These regions are similar to the regions that have been associated with working memory and long-term memory. In Section 9.2, the brain regions associated with imagery are reviewed, which also include sensory processing regions, the lateral prefrontal cortex, and the parietal cortex, similarly to working memory. Section 9.3 details the regions of the brain associated with language processing, which include the left inferior lateral prefrontal cortex and the left posterior lateral temporal cortex; these regions are of relevance to multiple types of memory. Section 9.4 considers brain regions associated with emotion and their role in memory. Section 9.5 touches on a relatively new line of research that considers the role of memory in decision-making.

Working memory refers to actively holding information in mind during a relatively short period of time, typically seconds. During working memory paradigms, information is actively kept in mind during the delay period. Working memory has been associated with activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, the parietal cortex, and sensory processing regions. Section 8.1 details the brain regions that store the contents of working memory during the delay period. In Section 8.2, the evidence is evaluated that claims to link working memory with the hippocampus. Section 8.3 considers the brain timing commonly associated with working memory. In Section 8.4, brain activity associated with working memory that oscillates at particular frequencies is considered, which primarily includes alpha activity and gamma activity. In Section 8.5, changes in brain activity are highlighted that have been linked to training-related increases in working memory capacity.

This chapter focuses on long-term memory in animals, which relates to the research conducted with humans. Section 11.1 shows that rats, cats, and monkeys have the same medial temporal lobe organization as humans. The perirhinal cortex is associated with item memory, the parahippocampal cortex is associated with context memory, and the hippocampus is associated with binding item information and context information. In Section 11.2, long-term potentiation in the hippocampus is discussed. Section 11.3 reviews evidence for memory replay in rats, which refers to reactivation of the same brain regions in the same or the reverse temporal sequence that were activated during a previous event. In Section 11.4, time cells in the rat hippocampus are discussed. Section 11.5 considers the behavioral evidence and the brain evidence that indicates animals have episodic memory. This has proven to be a controversial topic because animals cannot tell us whether or not they “remember.”