Affiliation: GIGA-CRC Human Imaging, University of Liège, Belgium
Friday 9th of May 14.15-15.00
Aula Magna
“How changes in brain activity may help to preserve cognitive performance during healthy aging“
The advent of neuroimaging techniques since the 1990s has made it possible to investigate the neural substrates of age-related cognitive changes. Integrity of prefrontal areas was initially proposed as responsible for lowered performance when the tasks require controlled processes – the frontal lobe hypothesis proposed by West in 1996. In the next decades, observation of brain activity with PET and fMRI techniques during episodic memory and executive tasks showed that aging is associated with both increase and decrease of activity, reduction in left-right brain activity asymmetry, and shift between activity in anterior and posterior areas. Interestingly, recruitment of these alternative brain networks was sometimes associated with good cognitive performance, challenging the notion that changes in brain activity during aging is a marker of decline for high-level cognitive processes. Neuroimaging data also led to the proposal that life course experiences, and biological and health characteristics allows the constitution of cognitive and brain reserve that help to counteract the effect of aging on cognition. These data will be gathered to provide an integrative view of age-related changes in high-level cognitive processes, and their relevance to understand mechanisms favoring cognitive health in aging will be discussed.