Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.
Social, Life, and Engineering Sciences Imaging Center, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.
Brain Lang. 2020 Jul;206:104771. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2020.104771. Epub 2020 Apr 11.
Healthy older adults commonly report increased difficulties with language production. This could reflect decline in the language network, or age-related declines in other cognitive abilities that support language production, such as executive function. To examine this possibility, we conducted a whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) analysis in older and younger adults using two seed regions-the left posterior superior temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus. Whole-brain connectivities were then correlated with Stroop task performance to investigate the relationship between RSFC and executive function. We found that overall, younger adults had stronger RSFC than older adults. Moreover, in older, but not younger, adults stronger RSFC between left IFG and right hemisphere executive function regions correlated with better Stroop performance. This suggests that stronger RSFC among older adults between left IFG and right hemisphere regions may serve a compensatory function.
健康的老年人通常会报告语言生成方面的困难增加。这可能反映了语言网络的衰退,或者与语言生成相关的其他认知能力(如执行功能)的年龄相关下降。为了检验这种可能性,我们使用两个种子区域(左后颞上回和左额下回)对老年人和年轻人进行了全脑静息状态功能连接(RSFC)分析。然后,将全脑连接与 Stroop 任务表现相关联,以研究 RSFC 与执行功能之间的关系。我们发现,总体而言,年轻人的 RSFC 比老年人强。此外,在老年人中,但不在年轻人中,左 IFG 与右侧执行功能区域之间更强的 RSFC 与更好的 Stroop 表现相关。这表明,老年人左 IFG 与右侧区域之间更强的 RSFC 可能起到了代偿作用。