Elsevier

Neurobiology of Aging

Volume 36, Issue 11, November 2015, Pages 3045-3055
Neurobiology of Aging

Regular article
Idiosyncratic responding during movie-watching predicted by age differences in attentional control

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2015.07.028Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

Much is known about how age affects the brain during tightly controlled, though largely contrived, experiments, but do these effects extrapolate to everyday life? Naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, closely mimic the real world and provide a window onto the brain's ability to respond in a timely and measured fashion to complex, everyday events. Young adults respond to these stimuli in a highly synchronized fashion, but it remains to be seen how age affects neural responsiveness during naturalistic viewing. To this end, we scanned a large (N = 218), population-based sample from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) during movie-watching. Intersubject synchronization declined with age, such that older adults' response to the movie was more idiosyncratic. This decreased synchrony related to cognitive measures sensitive to attentional control. Our findings suggest that neural responsivity changes with age, which likely has important implications for real-world event comprehension and memory.

Keywords

Natural vision
Aging
Attentional control
fMRI
Independent components analysis
Intersubject correlation

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1

Present address: Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, King's College London, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF UK.