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Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 8|pp 2312—2326

Cognitive fatigue and cortical-striatal network in old age

Ping Ren1, Andrew J. Anderson2,3, Kelsey McDermott1, Timothy M. Baran3,4, Feng Lin1,2,5,6,7
  • 1School of Nursing, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
  • 2Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
  • 3Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
  • 4Department of Imaging Sciences, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
  • 5Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
  • 6Department of Neurology, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
  • 7Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
Received: November 21, 2018Accepted: April 10, 2019Published: April 17, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101915

Copyright: Ren et al. This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Cognitive fatigue (CF) is among the most common and disturbing aging symptoms, and substantially interferes with activities demanding sustained mental effort. Here we examined the relationship between the cortical-striatal network and CF (assessed by the 18-item visual analogue scale) when a group of cognitively and physically healthy older adults participated in a 30-minute cognitively fatiguing task-related fMRI experiment. We also explored whether CF would interfere with the “Posterior-Anterior Shifting in Aging” (PASA) phenomenon, an aging-associated neural reliance on frontal regions to support cognitive capacity. We revealed that decreased connectivity strength of the cortical-striatal network over the course of the task was related to higher CF. Correlation between CF and the cortical-striatal network was more robust in anterior relative to posterior components. Moreover, a positive relationship between reliance on the anterior part of the cortical-striatal network and cognitive performance only existed among older adults experiencing low CF. These findings suggest a crucial role of the cortical-striatal network, especially the anterior component, in linking to CF. The PASA phenomenon may only be applicable to older adults without vulnerability to CF.