Abstract
Albeit cognitive flexibility is well known to decline in aging, it has not been considered that this ability often requires sequential task control. That is, one may re-use tasks that have previously been abandoned in favor of another task. It is unclear whether sequential cognitive flexibility is affected in aging and what neurophysiological mechanisms and functional neuroanatomical structures are associated with these effects. We examined this question in a system neurophysiological study using EEG and source localization in healthy and elderly adults. We show that elderly people reveal deficient sequential cognitive flexibility. Elderly people encounter increased costs to overcome the inhibition of the lately abandoned task set that becomes relevant again and needs to be re-used. The neurophysiological (EEG) data show that differences in sequential cognitive flexibility between young and elderly people emerge as a consequence of two independent, dysfunctional processes: (i) the ability to suppress task-irrelevant information and (ii) the ability to re-implement a previously abandoned task set during response selection. These independent processes were associated with activation differences in inferior frontal and inferior parietal regions. The study reveals a new facet of cognitive flexibility dysfunctions in healthy elderlies.
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This work was supported by a Grant from the BMBF 01GL1741C and partly by SFB 940 project B8.
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The research involved young (mean age 24.52, all > 18 years) and elderly (mean age 60.10 years) human participants. Before any of the study’s procedures started, written informed consent was obtained from all subjects. All participants were treated according to the Declaration of Helsinki. The ethics committee of the TU Dresden approved the study. There were no conflicts of interest. The present study was supported by a Grant from the BMBF 01GL1741C and partly by SFB 940 project B8.
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Giller, F., Beste, C. Effects of aging on sequential cognitive flexibility are associated with fronto-parietal processing deficits. Brain Struct Funct 224, 2343–2355 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-019-01910-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-019-01910-z