Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
Neurobiol Aging. 2022 Dec;120:149-166. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2022.08.006. Epub 2022 Aug 19.
The locus coeruleus-noradrenergic system integrates signals about arousal states throughout the brain and helps coordinate cognitive selectivity. However, age-related changes in this system may impact how arousal coordinates selectivity in older adults. To examine this, we compared how increases in emotional arousal modulates cognitive selectivity for images differing in perceptual salience in young and older adults. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that relative to older adults, hearing an arousing sound enhanced young adults' bottom-up processing and incidental memory for high versus low salience category-selective body images. We also examined how arousing sounds impacted a top-down goal to detect dot-probes that appeared immediately after high or low salience images. We found that young adults were slower to detect probes appearing after high salience body images on arousing trials, whereas older adults showed this pattern on non-arousing trials. Taken together, our findings show that arousal's effect on selectivity changes with age and differs across bottom-up and top-down processing.
蓝斑-去甲肾上腺素能系统整合了大脑中关于觉醒状态的信号，并有助于协调认知选择性。然而，该系统的年龄相关变化可能会影响老年人的觉醒如何协调选择性。为了研究这一点，我们比较了情绪唤醒的增加如何调节年轻人和老年人对不同感知显著性的图像的认知选择性。使用功能磁共振成像，我们发现与老年人相比，听到令人兴奋的声音会增强年轻人对高与低显著性类别选择性身体图像的自下而上的处理和偶然记忆。我们还研究了令人兴奋的声音如何影响立即出现在高或低显著性图像之后的探测点的自上而下的目标。我们发现，在令人兴奋的试验中，年轻人在探测高显著性身体图像后的探测点时反应较慢，而老年人在非令人兴奋的试验中则表现出这种模式。总之，我们的研究结果表明，唤醒对选择性的影响会随着年龄的增长而变化，并且在自下而上和自上而下的处理过程中存在差异。
