Abstract
The aging process is characterized by change across several measures that index cognitive status and brain integrity. In the present study, 54 cognitively-healthy younger and older adults, were analyzed, longitudinally, on a verbal working memory task to investigate the effect of brain maintenance (i.e., cortical thickness) and cognitive reserve (i.e., NART IQ as proxy) factors on a derived measure of neural efficiency. Participants were scanned using fMRI while presented with the Letter Sternberg task, a verbal working memory task consisting of encoding, maintenance and retrieval phases, where cognitive load is manipulated by varying the number of presented items (i.e., between one and six letters). Via correlation analysis, we looked at region-level and whole-brain relationships between load levels within each phase and then computed a global task measure, what we term phase specificity, to analyze how similar neural responses were across load levels within each phase compared to between each phase. We found that longitudinal change in phase specificity was positively related to longitudinal change in cortical thickness, at both the whole-brain and regional level. Additionally, baseline NART IQ was positively related to longitudinal change in phase specificity over time. Furthermore, we found a longitudinal effect of sex on change in phase specificity, such that females displayed higher phase specificity over time. Cross-sectional findings aligned with longitudinal findings, with the notable exception of behavioral performance being positively linked to phase specificity cross-sectionally at baseline. Taken together, our findings suggest that phase specificity positively relates to brain maintenance and reserve factors and should be better investigated as a measure of neural efficiency.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Custom-written code detailing analyses can be made available upon reasonable request.
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We wish to gratefully acknowledge support from the grant NIH/NIA R01AG038465-06.
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G.A. analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. G.A. and C.H. conceived and verified the analytical methods. C.H. and Y.S. conceived the study and designed the experiments. All authors contributed to the final version of the manuscript.
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Argiris, G., Stern, Y. & Habeck, C. Neural similarity across task load relates to cognitive reserve and brain maintenance measures on the Letter Sternberg task: a longitudinal study. Brain Imaging and Behavior 17, 100–113 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-022-00746-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-022-00746-2