THURSDAY, Sept. 3, 2026 (HealthDay News) — A person’s memory starts to get worse much sooner than previously thought, a new study says.

Folks in their 50s start showing signs of decreased memory function, likely due to changes in the brain region responsible for stabilizing memories, researchers reported recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

“This is one of a growing list of studies highlighting that the period of middle age is really important for memory functioning and shouldn't be ignored,” senior researcher Ian McDonough, an associate professor of psychology at Binghamton University in New York, said in a news release.

Memories start when the brain records a new memory, researchers said in background notes. Shortly thereafter, a brain region called the hippocampus replays the memory to stabilize it, making it available for recall when needed.

For this study, researchers tracked how aging affected the way information passes between those stages, and thus how memories are stored. 

The team asked a group of about 60 adults ages 18 to 74 to review faces paired with various objects and scenes. After a five-minute rest, participants completed a memory test to choose the correct object or scene linked to each face.

During this exercise, MRI scans recorded readings of their hippocampal activity, researchers said.

Results showed that middle-aged participants often paired a face with the wrong object or scene. They remembered the items, but not the correct pairing.

Researchers assumed that older adults would show weaker hippocampal activity, which would explain poorer recall.

What they actually discovered was more interesting.

The mistakes made by young adults occurred because their brains failed to activate the original memory patterns, which was expected.

But older adults made mistakes even though their brains showed strong activation of those memory patterns, researchers found.

“The more they reactivate the hippocampus that’s consistent with encoding, the more likely they are to make these memory errors,” McDonough said. “So instead of that reactivation pattern being associated with better memory, it’s associated with those errors.”

It’s not known why the usual pattern of creating and retrieving memories starts to fail as we age, McDonough said.

“We’re seeing a big decline in memory accuracy from the 20- to 30-year-old age group, to people in their 50s," he said. "Some of these hippocampal processes already start to decline by midlife. That suggests middle age is really a transition point.”

Researchers said future studies should look more closely at memory processes, and explore how brain stimulation after learning impacts memory.

This research could be particularly insightful if it tracks people from middle age onward, McDonough said.

“We really don't have a good scientific understanding of what is happening in middle age, because the brain is not declining uniformly across this time, with some regions declining faster than others,” McDonough said. “Finding when those tipping points are is going to be important.”

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more about memory.

SOURCE: Binghamton University, news release, Aug. 31, 2026