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The Lifespan Trajectories of Brain Activity Related to Cognitive Control: A Meta-Analytic Study
Preprint   Open access

The Lifespan Trajectories of Brain Activity Related to Cognitive Control: A Meta-Analytic Study

Guochun Yang, Zhenghan Li, Isaac T Petersen, Lingxiao Wang, Joaquim Radua and Xun Liu
bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
01/25/2024
DOI: 10.1101/2023.08.20.554018
PMCID: PMC10473599
PMID: 37662396
url
https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.08.20.554018 View
Preprint (Author's original)This preprint has not been evaluated by subject experts through peer review. Preprints may undergo extensive changes and/or become peer-reviewed journal articles. Open Access

Abstract

Cognitive control plays a pivotal role in guiding human goal-directed behavior, and revealing its lifespan trajectory is crucial for optimizing cognitive functioning at different ages, especially for stages of rapid development and decline. While existing studies have shed light on the inverted U-shaped trajectory of cognitive control function both behaviorally and anatomically, little is known about the corresponding changes in functional brain activation with age. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of 129 neuroimaging studies using conflict tasks, encompassing 3,388 participants whose age spanned from 5 to 85 years old. We applied the seed-based mapping (SDM), generalized additive model (GAM) and model comparison approaches to investigate age-related changes of brain activity, chart the lifespan trajectories and pinpoint peaks of cognitive control brain activity. The present study have three major findings: 1) The inverted U-shaped lifespan trajectory is the predominant pattern; 2) Cognitive control related brain regions exhibit heterogeneous lifespan trajectories: the frontoparietal control network (such as the inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule) follows inverted U-shaped trajectories, peaking between 24 and 41 years, while the dorsal attention network (such as the frontal eye field and superior parietal lobule) demonstrates flatter trajectories with age; 3) Both the youth and the elderly show weaker brain activities and greater left laterality than young adults. These results collectively reveal the lifespan trajectories of cognitive control, highlighting heterogeneous fluctuations in brain networks with age. This meta-analysis aims to reveal the lifespan trajectory of brain activities related to cognitive control, and shows that part of the brain regions related to cognitive control exhibit inverted U-shaped trajectory across the lifespan, while other regions show flatter trajectory patterns. Importantly, no other trajectory patterns are observed. We also found the elderly show weaker brain activities and more asymmetric brain activities than young adults, inconsistent with the hypotheses from existing theories.

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