Abstract
Maintaining the ability to arrange thoughts and actions in an appropriate serial order is crucial for complex behavior. We aimed to investigate age differences in the fronto-striato-parietal network underlying serial ordering using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We exposed 25 young and 27 older healthy adults to a digit ordering task, where they had to reorder and recall sequential digits or simply to recall them. We detected a network comprising of the lateral and medial prefrontal, posterior parietal, and striatal regions. In young adults, the prefrontal and parietal regions were more activated and more strongly connected with the supplementary motor area for “reorder & recall” than “pure recall” trials (psychophysiological interaction, PPI). In older adults, the prefrontal and parietal activations were elevated, but the PPI was attenuated. Individual adults who had a stronger PPI performed more accurately in “reorder & recall” trials. The decreased PPI appeared to be compensated by increased physiological correlations between the prefrontal/parietal cortex and the striatum, and by that between the striatum and the supplementary motor area.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Neurobiology of Aging |
| Volume | 87 |
| Pages (from-to) | 115-124 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| ISSN | 0197-4580 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 03.2020 |
Funding
The authors would like to thank Prof. Hoi-Chung Leung for her comments on task design, and Shaoyang Ma and Minghong Su for their assistance in data acquisition. Authors' contributions: ZY and TFM designed the research; ZY, GZ, SL, YZ, WX, and XZ performed the research; ZY analyzed the data; ZY and TFM wrote the paper. All authors approved the submitted version. This study was approved by the ethical committee of Peking University Third Hospital in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Each participant signed a written informed consent before participating in this study. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China , China ( 31771216 , 31630034 ), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB32020200), the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology , China Major Project ( 2018SHZDZX05 ), the German Research Foundation , Germany (SFB TR134 C1), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation , Germany. Appendix A
Research Areas and Centers
- Academic Focus: Center for Brain, Behavior and Metabolism (CBBM)
