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Aging and response conflict solution: behavioural and functional connectivity changes

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Abstract

Healthy aging has been found associated with less efficient response conflict solution, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms have remained elusive. In a two-experiment study, we first examined the behavioural consequences of this putative age-related decline for conflicts induced by spatial stimulus–response incompatibility. We then used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from a large, independent sample of adults (n = 399; 18–85 years) to investigate age differences in functional connectivity between the nodes of a network previously found associated with incompatibility-induced response conflicts in the very same paradigm. As expected, overcoming interference from conflicting response tendencies took longer in older adults, even after accounting for potential mediator variables (general response speed and accuracy, motor speed, visuomotor coordination ability, and cognitive flexibility). Experiment 2 revealed selective age-related decreases in functional connectivity between bilateral anterior insula, pre-supplementary motor area, and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Importantly, these age effects persisted after controlling for regional grey-matter atrophy assessed by voxel-based morphometry. Meta-analytic functional profiling using the BrainMap database showed these age-sensitive nodes to be more strongly linked to highly abstract cognition, as compared with the remaining network nodes, which were more strongly linked to action-related processing. These findings indicate changes in interregional coupling with age among task-relevant network nodes that are not specifically associated with conflict resolution per se. Rather, our behavioural and neural data jointly suggest that healthy aging is associated with difficulties in properly activating non-dominant but relevant task schemata necessary to exert efficient cognitive control over action.

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Acknowledgments

The study was in part supported by the Human Brain Project (R01-MH074457-01A1, S.B.E.), the Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association within the Helmholtz Alliance on Systems Biology (Human Brain Model, S.B.E), the Helmholtz Alliance for Mental Health in an Aging Society (HelMA, K.A.), and the German Research Foundation (DFG: EI 816/4-1, S.B.E.; and LA 3071/3-1, R.L. & S.B.E.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Clinical Neuroscience and Medical Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Robert Langner, Edna C. Cieslik & Simon B. Eickhoff

  2. Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Centre Jülich, 52425, Jülich, Germany

    Robert Langner, Edna C. Cieslik, Simone D. Behrwind, Christian Roski, Svenja Caspers, Katrin Amunts & Simon B. Eickhoff

  3. C. & O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Katrin Amunts

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  1. Robert Langner
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  2. Edna C. Cieslik
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  3. Simone D. Behrwind
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  4. Christian Roski
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  5. Svenja Caspers
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  7. Simon B. Eickhoff
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Correspondence to Robert Langner.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

429_2014_758_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Online Resource 1 Supplementary results of the quantitative functional profiling (Fig. S1) and the connectivity analysis in an emotion-related control network (Table S1). (PDF 111 kb) (PDF 111 kb)

Online Resource 2 Supplementary methods of the exploratory whole-brain connectivity analysis. (PDF 102 kb)

429_2014_758_MOESM3_ESM.pdf

Online Resource 3 Supplementary methods of the voxel-based morphometry analysis and the control analysis for the influence of morphological parameters on functional connectivity. (PDF 83 kb)

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Langner, R., Cieslik, E.C., Behrwind, S.D. et al. Aging and response conflict solution: behavioural and functional connectivity changes. Brain Struct Funct 220, 1739–1757 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-014-0758-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-014-0758-0

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