Greater BOLD variability in older compared with younger adults during audiovisual speech perception

Older adults exhibit decreased performance and increased trial-to-trial variability on a range of cognitive tasks, including speech perception. We used blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD fMRI) to search for neural correlates of these behavioral phenomena. We com...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014-10, Vol.9 (10), p.e111121-e111121
Main Authors: Baum, Sarah H, Beauchamp, Michael S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adults
Age
Age Factors
Aged
Aging
Biology and Life Sciences
Brain
Brain - physiology
Brain Mapping
Brain research
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive ability
Cognitive tasks
Comparative analysis
Cortex (auditory)
Cortex (temporal)
Female
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Head movement
Hemodynamics
Humans
Identification
Magnetic resonance
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
Middle Aged
Neurobiology
Neuroimaging
Neurosciences
Neurovascular Coupling
NMR
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Older people
Oxygen
Perception
Reactive oxygen species
Research and Analysis Methods
Science
Sensory integration
Social Sciences
Speech
Speech Perception
Standard deviation
Superior temporal sulcus
Syllables
Trends
Variability
Visual cortex
Visual Perception
Young Adult
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Summary:Older adults exhibit decreased performance and increased trial-to-trial variability on a range of cognitive tasks, including speech perception. We used blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD fMRI) to search for neural correlates of these behavioral phenomena. We compared brain responses to simple speech stimuli (audiovisual syllables) in 24 healthy older adults (53 to 70 years old) and 14 younger adults (23 to 39 years old) using two independent analysis strategies: region-of-interest (ROI) and voxel-wise whole-brain analysis. While mean response amplitudes were moderately greater in younger adults, older adults had much greater within-subject variability. The greatly increased variability in older adults was observed for both individual voxels in the whole-brain analysis and for ROIs in the left superior temporal sulcus, the left auditory cortex, and the left visual cortex. Increased variability in older adults could not be attributed to differences in head movements between the groups. Increased neural variability may be related to the performance declines and increased behavioral variability that occur with aging.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0111121