Key result
Aging is linked to more non-redundant cuneal cortex activation during visual problem-solving, supporting functional compensation.
Why the study?
It remained debated whether additional brain activity recruited by older adults actually helps their cognitive performance.
Does age-related additional brain activity in healthy older adults compensate for reduced cognitive function during a problem-solving task?
Cross-Sectional (n=223)
Does age-related additional brain activity in healthy older adults compensate for reduced cognitive function during a problem-solving task?
The study provides strong evidence for functional compensation in healthy ageing, showing that increased activity in the cuneal cortex during visual problem-solving helps maintain cognitive performance.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Supports functional compensation in aging; leaves open causal effects on performance in cross-sectional data.
Functional compensation is a common notion in the neuroscience of healthy ageing, whereby older adults are proposed to recruit additional brain activity to compensate for reduced cognitive function. However, whether this additional brain activity in older participants actually helps their cognitive performance remains debated. We examined brain activity and cognitive performance in a human lifespan sample (N=223) while they performed a problem-solving task (based on Cattell’s test of fluid intelligence) during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Whole-brain univariate analysis revealed that activity in bilateral cuneal cortex for hard vs. easy problems increased both with age and with performance, even when adjusting for an estimate of age-related differences in cerebrovascular reactivity. Multivariate Bayesian decoding further demonstrated that age increased the likelihood that activation patterns in this cuneal region provided non-redundant information about the two task conditions, beyond that of the multiple-demand network generally activated in this task. This constitutes some of the strongest evidence yet for functional compensation in healthy ageing, at least in this brain region during visual problem-solving.
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Knights et al. (2024) conducted a cross-sectional in Healthy ageing (n=223). Age was evaluated on Activity in bilateral cuneal cortex for hard vs. easy problems. Age increased the likelihood that activation patterns in the bilateral cuneal cortex provided non-redundant information during visual problem-solving, supporting functional compensation.
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