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| Home > Publications database > Neural correlates of age-related differences in dual-task performance |
| Dissertation / PhD Thesis | FZJ-2024-05120 |
2024
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Please use a persistent id in citations: doi:10.34734/FZJ-2024-05120
Abstract: Performing two tasks concurrently or in close succession comes with costs in speed and accuracy compared to single tasks, especially in older individuals. In a society where people are increasingly accustomed to juggling several tasks simultaneously, interest in the underlying mechanisms of dual-task interference has increased. Thereby, it is crucial to understand how response characteristics affect the costs of dual-tasking, especially facing a rapidly aging society. For this reason, this work aimed to analyze age differences in behavioral (Study 1) and neural correlates (Study 2) of dual-task interference at the response level, and their associations with executive functioning (EF) abilities. We induced response-related dual-task interference by requiring participants to make two spatially incongruent manual responses depending on the pitch of a single auditory stimulus. Both studies revealed increased interference with incongruent responses, particularly in older adults. This interference showed asymmetric cost allocation, favoring the more demanding task, suggesting flexible resource allocation and strategic processing prioritization. In healthy aging, results emphasized increased response confusability and deficits in shielding tasks from interference. Utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging, Study 2 demonstrated that dual-tasking with response interference engaged the domain-general multiple-demand network (MDN). The activity within the MDN was only minimally affected by individual differences in EF performance. Older adults exhibited non-compensatory hyperactivity in the left superior frontal gyrus when confronted with incongruent responses, and working memory processes modulated their right premotor and frontal activity during dual-tasking. Transitioning from analyzing group-level patterns in brain-behavior associations to predicting individual cognitive performance based on neuroimaging data, Study 3 highlighted the challenge of predicting individual EF abilities from structural and functional characteristics of different brain networks. While morphometric data showed promise in older adults, measures of functional brain variability proved more predictive for young adults. Moreover, the importance of the whole-brain organization became apparent compared to task-specific networks. In summary, these findings emphasize the age-related difficulties in shielding concurrent tasks, the involvement of the MDN in resolving response-related conflict during dual-tasking, and the limits of relying on single brain metrics as reliable predictors of EF abilities.
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