Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 31, Issue 12, Pages 4496-4503Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5641-10.2011
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Funding
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research [MOP14036, MOP13026]
- JS McDonnell Foundation
- Canada Research Chairs program
- Ontario Research Fund
- Canadian Foundation for Innovation
- IODE (Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire)
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Alberta Scholarship Programs
- Soroptimist International of Toronto
- Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest
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New work suggests that blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal variability can be a much more powerful index of human age than meanactivation, and that older brains are actually less variable than younger brains. However, little is known of how BOLD variability and task performance may relate. In the current study, we examined BOLD variability in relation to age, and reaction time speed and consistency in healthy younger (20-30 years) and older (56-85 years) adults on three cognitive tasks (perceptual matching, attentional cueing, and delayed match-to-sample). Results indicated that younger, faster, and more consistent performers exhibited significantly higher brain variability across tasks, and showed greater variability-based regional differentiation compared with older, poorer-performing adults. Also, when we compared brain variability- and typical mean-based effects, the respective spatial patterns were essentially orthogonal across brain measures, and any regions that did overlap were largely opposite in directionality of effect. These findings help establish the functional basis of BOLD variability, and further support the statistical and spatial differentiation between BOLD variability and BOLD mean. We thus argue that the precise nature of relations between aging, cognition, and brain function is underappreciated by using mean-based brain measures exclusively.
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