Neural Correlates of Local and Global Prediction Errors Show Similar Linear Age-related Decline But Differential Associations with Working Memory

Senescence is accompanied by decreased weighting of sensory inputs and increased reliance on predictions, resulting in the attenuation of prediction errors in older age. However, little is known about how the attenuation develops across adulthood. To delineate the age-related trajectory of the attenuation of hierarchical predictive processing, here, we recorded electroencephalography from a cohort of 406 healthy participants (146 male, 260 female) between 15 and 82 years of age using a modified version of the auditory local–global paradigm where short-term and long-term regularities were orthogonally manipulated. Linear age-related decline can be seen in both cortical responses signaling local prediction errors (including the mismatch negativity and P3a) and global prediction errors (including the frontocentral negativity and P3b). The attenuated local prediction errors contributed only partly to the attenuated global prediction errors, indicating that there should still be age-related changes in the feedforward path that contribute to the attenuated global prediction errors. Moreover, whereas local prediction errors correlated with working memory only before age was partialed out, global prediction errors correlated with working memory even after age was partialed out, suggesting that the attenuation of prediction errors might serve as a useful index of deterioration in different subcomponents in high-level cognitive functioning.