Abstract
The locus coeruleus is critical for selective information processing by modulating the brain’s connectivity configuration. Increasingly, studies have suggested that LC controls sensory inputs at the sensory gating stage. Furthermore, accumulating evidence has shown that young children and older adults are more prone to distraction and filter out irrelevant information less efficiently, possibly due to the unoptimized LC connectivity. However, the LC connectivity pattern across the life span is not fully examined yet, hampering our ability to understand the relationship between LC development and the distractibility. In this study, we examined the intrinsic network connectivity of the LC using a public fMRI dataset with wide-range age samples. Based on LC-seed functional connectivity maps, we examined the age-related variation in the LC connectivity with a quadratic model. The analyses revealed two connectivity patterns explicitly. The sensory-related brain regions showed a positive quadratic age effect (u-shape), and the frontal regions for the cognitive control showed a negative quadratic age effect (inverted u-shape). Our results imply that such age-related distractibility is possibly due to the impaired sensory gating by the LC and the insufficient top-down controls by the frontal regions. We discuss the underlying neural mechanisms and limitations of our study.
Highlights
A significant positive quadratic relationship of age was found for connectivity between the locus coeruleus (LC) and several other regions that are mainly associated with the sensory process
Given the findings that children and older adults are prone to distraction [7,8,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39], we hypothesized that the LC, a critical region for selective information processing in the brain, showed distinct connectivity patterns with other regions in early childhood and older adulthood compared to younger and middle adults who show more stable attentional ability
The current analyses revealed that the LC connectivity with the frontal regions showed an inverted U-shaped curve pattern
Summary
The locus coeruleus (LC) is a small nucleus located deep in the brainstem and a major source of norepinephrine. The LC releases norepinephrine to almost the entire brain throughout its efferent projections according to both the phasic and tonic firing of LC neurons, thereby the LC is one of the primary brain regions critical for selective information processing by changing the brain’s configurations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Recent studies consistently have suggested that the LC functionally controls sensory inputs at the early sensory gating stage by changing the brain’s connectivity configurations [11,12,13].
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