Speaker
Description
Aging is a lifelong process encompassing time-sensitive trajectories leading to different degrees of healthy-/unhealthy-aging. Executive functions, including perceptual processing, cognitive control and motor action, as well as their plasticity, are heavily modulated by such trajectories.
Within the realm of perceptual processes, predictive coding theory posits that perception is a decision-making process which relies on the brain's ability to anticipate sensory inputs based on prior experience, dynamically integrating top-down expectations with bottom-up sensory evidence. Such mechanisms rely on oscillatory modulation in posterior alpha band amplitude concerning prior exploitation, frontoparietal theta connectivity exploiting cognitive control over sensory input and motor beta modulation, exploiting response preparation.
However, it remains unclear how the prior-knowledge/sensory-input balance changes with age and whether aging leads to systematic re-weightings of perceptual inference expectations.
Here I show how aging influences prior integration during perceptual decision-making. Older adults exhibit greater reliance on prior expectations, reflected by increased response bias and reduced perceptual sensitivity. Neurophysiological analyses reveal alterations in oscillatory activity across sensory, motor, and executive domains. Specifically, older adults show reduced alpha modulation, increased beta desynchronization, and reduced theta fronto-parietal connectivity. These findings suggest that aging leads to neurocognitive reorganization, characterized by increased reliance on prior expectations and reduced flexibility in integrating sensory information. Moreover, they show reduced learning abilities of implicit priors, speaking for reduced plasticity.
Importantly, chronological age does not fully account for this trajectory. Instead, interindividual differences in cognitive style mediate these changes, with the use of flexible context-dependent strategies providing the most effective healthy-aging strategy.
| If you're submitting a symposium talk, what's the symposium title? | “Typical and Atypical” Aging: From Cognitive Aging to Neurocognitive Disorders |
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| If you're submitting a symposium, or a talk that is part of a symposium, is this a junior symposium? | No |
