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Qué PASA? The Posterior-Anterior Shift in Aging. Simon W. Davis, Nancy A. Dennis, Sander M. Daselaar, Mathias S. Fleck, & Roberto Cabeza Cerebral Cortex , doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm155. Background. PASA (posterior-anterior shift in aging):
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Qué PASA? The Posterior-Anterior Shift in Aging Simon W. Davis, Nancy A. Dennis, Sander M. Daselaar, Mathias S. Fleck, & Roberto Cabeza CerebralCortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm155
Background • PASA (posterior-anterior shift in aging): • an age-related reduction in occipital activity coupled with increased frontal activity (Grady, 1994) • PASA pattern has found in attention, visual perception, visuospatial processing, working memory, episodic memory encoding & retrieval
Unfinished issues of PASA • Validity of PASA: It may simply reflect difference in task difficulty (ic. objective & subject measures of difficulty), especially in its prefrontal cortex (PFC) component. • Function of PASA: No study has found PFC activations in older adults positively associated with performance and negatively associated with occipital activation
Unfinished issues of PASA─Cont. • Generalizability of PASA: PASA effect has been observed for activation, but not for deactivation Past findings showed attenuated deactivations in posterior midline cortex in healthy older adults. possibility: compensating this deficit by deactivating anterior midline regions to a greater extent than younger adults?
Back to the current study • 3 predictions: 1. PASA will exist even eliminating differences in difficulty (the validity of PASA) 2. PFC activity will be positively correlated with cognitive performance and negatively correlated with occipital activity, supporting the compensation account (the function of PASA) 3. Older adults would show weaker deactivations in posterior midline regions but stronger deactivations in anterior medial regions (the generalizability of PASA)
Methods • Participants: 12 younger & 12 older adults were matched by a rank order based on corrected scores of ER and VP performance
Methods-cont. • Stimuli For the episodic retrieval (ER) task: 240 five-letter words & 80 five-letter pseudowords For the visual perception (VP) task 120 rectangles were divided by a jagged line to 2 areas, making different versions of a perceptual stimuli with different difficulty of subject performance
Methods-cont. • Behavioral paradigm Prior to scanning *Showing intermixed real words and pseudowords During scanning * 4 runs of the ER & 2 runs of the VP task were performed * accuracy & confidence were rated
Methods-cont. • MRI scanning *4-T GE scanner was used. * The anatomical MRI was acquired using a 3D T1- weighted echo-planar sequence. • fMRI analyses *Event-related blood oxygen level-dependent responses for each participant were analyzed using a modified general linear model
Results • Behavioral data
Results-cont. • Neuroimaging results
Results-cont. • Neuroimaging results show PASA was found when differences in task difficulty were eliminated
Results-cont. • Neuroimaging results show in older adults PFC activity was negatively correlated with activity in the occipital cortex, but positively correlated with ER/VP performance; in younger adults, no significant correlations between regions or between activity and performance
Results-cont. • Neuroimaging results indicated PASA was also found for deactivation
Discussion • Validity of PASA: against a difficulty account After removing difficulty difference, a clear PASA pattern was found─ * occipital activity: in younger > in older adults * PFC activity: in older > in younger adults
Discussion-cont. • Function of PASA: for the compensation account *PFC activity compensates for the decrease in occipital activity that is necessary for successful task performance
Discussion-cont. • Generalizability of PASA: posterior-anterior shift in deactivations * “Default network”─ previous studies indicated 1. posterior and anterior midline cortices are often deactivated during task compared with a resting baseline. 2. reallocating processing of resources to regions involving in task performance This present study showed only deactivation in posterior midline regions were reduced, but enhanced in anterior midline regions by aging.
Conclusion • PASA pattern acts in a compensatory manner of offset posterior-related neuroanatomical declines due to aging and is generalizable to deactivations across both task and difficulty.
Q: How could a region (eg. PFC) activate and deactivate simultaneously (see figure B&D)? If the regions of activation and deactivation are sort of different, is it proper to conclude more PFC activation and less occipital deactivation in older group?