Abstract
Age-related deterioration of attention decreases the ability to stay focused on the task at hand due to less efficient selection of relevant information and increased distractibility in the face of irrelevant, but salient stimuli. While older (compared with younger) adults may have difficulty suppressing salient distractors, the extent of these challenges differs vastly across individuals. Cognitive reserve measured by proxies of cognitively enriching life experiences, such as education, occupation, and leisure activities, is thought to mitigate the effects of the aging process and account for variability in trajectories of cognitive decline. Based on combined behavioral and neuroimaging (voxel-based morphometry) analyses of demographic, cognitive, and neural markers of aging and cognitive reserve proxy measures, we examine here predictors of variability in the age-related changes in attention function, indexed by ability to suppress salient distraction. Our findings indicate that in healthy (neurotypical), aging gray matter volume within several right lateralized fronto-parietal brain regions varies according to both levels of cognitive reserve (education) and the capacity to effectively select visual stimuli amid salient distraction. Thus, we provide here novel experimental evidence supporting Robertson’s theory of a right lateralized neural basis for cognitive reserve.
Highlights
Cognitive decline is frequently associated with aging (Ott et al 1995; Lipnicki et al 2013), yet older adults differ vastly in their capacity to withstand the aging process (Rapp and Amaral 1992; Norton et al 2014)
The results indicated that the Cognitive Reserve Index (CRI) education factor had an effect on Saliency Distraction (BF10 = 5.869) and contributed to the regression model compared with the null model (BFM = 5.882)
The analysis of behavioral performance indicated CRI education factor as a protective factor, that is, longer education was a significant predictor of lower Saliency Distraction in performance on the Global Local Task
Summary
Cognitive decline is frequently associated with aging (Ott et al 1995; Lipnicki et al 2013), yet older adults differ vastly in their capacity to withstand the aging process (Rapp and Amaral 1992; Norton et al 2014). The term neurocognitive/cognitive reserve, or reserve, refers to the observation that older adults who have been exposed to more cognitively stimulating environments are better protected against clinical symptomatology of a variety of neurological conditions, despite substantial disease-related neuropathological changes (Stern et al 1992; Cabeza et al 2018; Stern et al 2018; Xu et al 2019) In their seminal PET study, Stern et al (1992) examined regional cerebral blood flow over parietotemporal cortex (as a proxy marker of disease progression) in 3 groups of Alzheimer’s disease patients. In addition to education, the ongoing research on cognitive reserve in neurotypical aging has highlighted the role of occupational and leisure activities as additional factors offsetting the agerelated cognitive decline (i.e., proxies of neurocognitive reserve; for review, see Cabeza et al 2018)
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