Research Paper Volume 14, Issue 1 pp 161—194
Multivariate patterns of brain-behavior associations across the adult lifespan
- 1 Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE 68010, USA
- 2 Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
- 3 Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University Hospital Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
- 4 Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, Creighton University School of Medicine, Omaha, NE 68178, USA
Received: October 28, 2021 Accepted: December 20, 2021 Published: January 10, 2022
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203815How to Cite
Copyright: © 2022 Doucet 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
The nature of brain-behavior covariations with increasing age is poorly understood. In the current study, we used a multivariate approach to investigate the covariation between behavioral-health variables and brain features across adulthood. We recruited healthy adults aged 20–73 years-old (29 younger, mean age = 25.6 years; 30 older, mean age = 62.5 years), and collected structural and functional MRI (s/fMRI) during a resting-state and three tasks. From the sMRI, we extracted cortical thickness and subcortical volumes; from the fMRI, we extracted activation peaks and functional network connectivity (FNC) for each task. We conducted canonical correlation analyses between behavioral-health variables and the sMRI, or the fMRI variables, across all participants. We found significant covariations for both types of neuroimaging phenotypes (ps = 0.0004) across all individuals, with cognitive capacity and age being the largest opposite contributors. We further identified different variables contributing to the models across phenotypes and age groups. Particularly, we found behavior was associated with different neuroimaging patterns between the younger and older groups. Higher cognitive capacity was supported by activation and FNC within the executive networks in the younger adults, while it was supported by the visual networks’ FNC in the older adults. This study highlights how the brain-behavior covariations vary across adulthood and provides further support that cognitive performance relies on regional recruitment that differs between older and younger individuals.