Aging Gracefully: Compensatory Brain Activity in High-Performing Older Adults

Cabeza, Roberto; Anderson, Nicole; Locantore, Jill Kester; McIntosh, Anthony R.

doi:10.1006/nimg.2002.1280

Cited by 1,650 publications

(1,424 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Nevertheless, it is conceivable that factors related to job prestige, years of education, and BMI would allow individuals a higher level of cognitive functioning even in the face of declining verbal learning and memory. This relationship is shown in several studies of cognitive aging (Cabeza et al, 2002;Cournot et al, 2006;Plassman et al, 1995;Potter et al, 2008Potter et al, , 2006. Interestingly, factors loading on verbal fluency did not correlate with frontal white matter integrity or basal forebrain integrity in our study.…”

Section: Health and Psychosocial Variablessupporting

confidence: 78%

Basal forebrain integrity and cognitive memory profile in healthy aging

Düzel¹,

Münte²,

Lindenberger³

et al. 2010

Brain Research

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Age-related dysfunctions in cholinergic and dopaminergic neuromodulation are assumed to contribute to age-associated impairment of explicit memory. Both neurotransmitters also modulate attention, working memory, and processing speed. To date, in vivo evidence linking structural age-related changes in these neuromodulatory systems to dysfunction within or across these cognitive domains remains scarce. Using a factor analytical approach in a cross-sectional study including 86 healthy older (aged 55 to 83 years) and 24 young (aged 18 to 30 years) adults, we assessed the relationship between structural integrity-as measured by magnetization transfer ratio (MTR)-of the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA), main origin of dopaminergic projections, basal forebrain (major origin of cortical cholinergic projections), frontal white matter (FWM), and hippocampus to neuropsychological and psychosocial scores. Basal forebrain MTR and FWM changes correlated with a factor combining verbal learning and memory and working memory and, as indicated by measures of diffusion, were most likely due to vascular pathology. These findings suggest that frontal white matter integrity and cholinergic neuromodulation provide clues as to why age-related cognitive decline is often correlated across cognitive domains. IntroductionAge-related decline in learning and memory, often termed age-associated memory impairment (AAMI) (Crook et al., 1986), is a well-documented finding in healthy older adults (Balota et al., 2000;Cabeza et al., 2000;Craik, 1994;Salthouse, 2003), but the neurobiological correlates of this decline are still under debate. A consistent pattern of AAMI is a decrement in declarative memory (Tulving, 1985) most clearly apparent in impaired free recall and recollection (Buckner, 2004;Craik, 2006;Hedden and Gabrieli, 2004;Nilsson, 2003). Evidence from lesion studies in humans and animals indicates that

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Section: Health and Psychosocial Variablessupporting

confidence: 78%

Basal forebrain integrity and cognitive memory profile in healthy aging

Düzel¹,

Münte²,

Lindenberger³

et al. 2010

Brain Research

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“…In older adults, increased activity (Buckner, 2004; Cabeza, Anderson, Locantore, & McIntosh, 2002; Reuter‐Lorenz et al., 2000) or connectivity (Campbell, Grady, Ng, & Hasher, 2012; Davis, Dennis, Daselaar, Fleck, & Cabeza, 2008; Geerligs, Maurits, Renken, & Lorist, 2014) is often considered to be compensatory in nature. The recruitment of additional brain regions or increased connectivity between brain regions has been suggested to support the maintenance of cognitive function which would otherwise be disrupted due to age‐related brain changes, such as loss of gray matter or reductions in within‐network connectivity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thalamic functional connectivity and its association with behavioral performance in older age

et al. 2018

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IntroductionDespite the thalamus’ dense connectivity with both cortical and subcortical structures, few studies have specifically investigated how thalamic connectivity changes with age and how such changes are associated with behavior. This study investigated the effect of age on thalamo‐cortical and thalamo‐hippocampal functional connectivity (FC) and the association between thalamic FC and visual–spatial memory and reaction time (RT) performance in older adults.MethodsResting‐state functional magnetic resonance images were obtained from younger (n = 20) and older (n = 20) adults. A seed‐based approach was used to assess the FC between the thalamus and (1) sensory resting‐state networks; (2) the hippocampus. Participants also completed visual–spatial memory and RT tasks, from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB).ResultsOlder adults exhibited a loss of specificity in the FC between sensory thalamic subregions and corresponding sensory cortex. Greater thalamo‐motor FC in older adults was associated with faster RTs. Furthermore, older adults exhibited greater thalamo‐hippocampal FC compared to younger adults, which was greatest for those with the poorest visual–spatial memory performance.ConclusionAlthough older adults exhibited poorer visual–spatial memory and slower reaction times compared to younger adults, “good” and “poorer” older performers exhibited different patterns of thalamo‐cortical and thalamo‐hippocampal FC. These results highlight the potential role of thalamic connectivity in supporting reaction times and memory in aging. Furthermore, these results highlight the importance of including the thalamus in studies of aging to fully understand how brain changes with age may be associated with behavior.

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“…[7]) or a subset of older participants with higher performance (e.g. [9]). Similarly, in two recent ERP studies of retrieval, older adults demonstrated a larger and temporally sustained left inferior frontal negativity that was not observed in the young [49,65].…”

Section: Individual Differences In Cognition and Brain Agingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, white matter degradation functionally disrupts frontal pathways [5,50,53]. Because the maintenance of recency performance appears to be mediated, at least in part, by the recruitment of frontal cortical mechanisms [9,6,40,44,61], the engagement of appropriate strategies during this task appears to be critical.…”

Section: The Role Of the Frontal Lobes In Strategy Usementioning

confidence: 99%

Use it or lose it? SES mitigates age-related decline in a recency/recognition task

Czernochowski¹,

Fabiani

Friedman³

2008

Neurobiology of Aging

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An important goal of aging research is to determine factors leading to individual differences that might compensate for some of the deleterious effects of aging on cognition. To determine whether socio-economic status (SES) plays a role in mitigating age-related decrements in the recollection of contextual details, we categorized older participants into low-and high-SES groups. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were recorded in a picture memory task involving recency and recognition judgments. Young, old-low and old-high SES groups did not differ in recognition performance. However, on recency judgments, old-low subjects performed at chance, whereas oldhigh subjects did not differ significantly from young adults. Consistent with their preserved recency performance, a long-duration frontal negativity was significantly larger for recency compared to recognition trials in the ERPs of the old-high SES group only. These data suggest that older adults with higher SES levels can use strategies to compensate for the adverse effects of aging in complex source memory tasks by recruiting additional neural resources apparently not required by the young.

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Aging Gracefully: Compensatory Brain Activity in High-Performing Older Adults

Cited by 1,650 publications

References 44 publications

Basal forebrain integrity and cognitive memory profile in healthy aging

Basal forebrain integrity and cognitive memory profile in healthy aging

Thalamic functional connectivity and its association with behavioral performance in older age

Use it or lose it? SES mitigates age-related decline in a recency/recognition task

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