Roquet Angélique, Hinault Thomas, Badier Jean-Michel, Lemaire Patrick
Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, Marseille, France.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States.
Front Aging Neurosci. 2018 Aug 8;10:232. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2018.00232. eCollection 2018.
This study investigated age-related changes in the neural bases of sequential strategy interference. Sequential strategy interference refers to decreased strategy interference (i.e., poorer performance when the cued strategy is not the best) after executing a poorer strategy relative to after a better strategy. Young and older adults performed a computational estimation task (e.g., providing approximate products to two-digit multiplication problems, like 38 × 74) and were matched on behavioral sequential strategy interference effects. Analyses of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data revealed differences between young and older adults in brain activities underlying sequential strategy interference. More specifically, relative to young adults, older adults showed additional recruitments in frontal, temporal, and parietal regions. Also, age-related differences were found in the temporal dynamics of brain activations, with modulations occurring both earlier and later in older than young adults. These results suggest that highly functioning older adults rely on additional mechanisms to process sequential strategy interference as efficiently as young adults. Our findings inform mechanisms by which highly functioning older adults obtain as good performance as young adults, and suggest that these older adults may compensate deleterious effects of aging to efficiently execute arithmetic strategies.
本研究调查了序列策略干扰神经基础的年龄相关变化。序列策略干扰是指在执行相对较差的策略后，与执行较好的策略后相比，策略干扰减少（即当提示的策略不是最佳策略时表现更差）。年轻和年长成年人执行一项计算估计任务（例如，对两位数乘法问题提供近似乘积，如38×74），并在行为序列策略干扰效应上进行匹配。脑磁图（MEG）数据分析揭示了年轻和年长成年人在序列策略干扰潜在脑活动方面的差异。更具体地说，与年轻成年人相比，年长成年人在额叶、颞叶和顶叶区域有额外的神经活动。此外，在大脑激活的时间动态方面发现了年龄相关差异，年长成年人的调制比年轻成年人更早和更晚出现。这些结果表明，功能良好的年长成年人依靠额外的机制来像年轻成年人一样有效地处理序列策略干扰。我们的研究结果揭示了功能良好的年长成年人获得与年轻成年人相同表现的机制，并表明这些年长成年人可能补偿衰老的有害影响以有效地执行算术策略。
