Aging and response conflict solution: behavioural and functional connectivity changes.

Healthy aging has been found associated with less efficient response conflict solution, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms have remained elusive. In a two-experiment study, we first examined the behavioural consequences of this putative age-related decline for conflicts induced by spatial stimulus-response incompatibility. We then used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from a large, independent sample of adults (n = 399; 18-85 years) to investigate age differences in functional connectivity between the nodes of a network previously found associated with incompatibility-induced response conflicts in the very same paradigm. As expected, overcoming interference from conflicting response tendencies took longer in older adults, even after accounting for potential mediator variables (general response speed and accuracy, motor speed, visuomotor coordination ability, and cognitive flexibility). Experiment 2 revealed selective age-related decreases in functional connectivity between bilateral anterior insula, pre-supplementary motor area, and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Importantly, these age effects persisted after controlling for regional grey-matter atrophy assessed by voxel-based morphometry. Meta-analytic functional profiling using the BrainMap database showed these age-sensitive nodes to be more strongly linked to highly abstract cognition, as compared with the remaining network nodes, which were more strongly linked to action-related processing. These findings indicate changes in interregional coupling with age among task-relevant network nodes that are not specifically associated with conflict resolution per se. Rather, our behavioural and neural data jointly suggest that healthy aging is associated with difficulties in properly activating non-dominant but relevant task schemata necessary to exert efficient cognitive control over action.

Executive control in chronic schizophrenia: A perspective from manual stimulus-response compatibility task performance.

BACKGROUND: Antisaccade deficits are a well-documented pathophysiological characteristic in schizophrenia. However, it is yet unclear whether these findings reflect a specific oculomotor deficit, general psychomotor impairment or disturbance in executive control mechanisms. METHODS: Performance in a manual stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) task and a neuropsychological test-battery covering different cognitive and motor domains were obtained in 28 patients with chronic schizophrenia. It was compared with a normative cohort of healthy subjects and validated by comparison with a sub-sample of that cohort consisting of 28 age, gender and education matched controls. RESULTS: Patients showed significantly worse performance than controls in tests requiring maintenance or manipulating of multiple components but were unimpaired in simple motor, memory or executive tasks. In the SRC task patients had a significantly worse performance in the congruent condition and also a significantly higher increase in error rate from the congruent to the incongruent condition. There were, however, neither a group difference nor a group-by-condition interaction with respect to reaction times. INTERPRETATION: : Our results provide evidence against an isolated oculomotor deficit but also against an undifferentiated psychomotor dysfunction in chronic schizophrenia. Rather, in synopsis with previous reports on antisaccade performance, it becomes evident that the degree of impairment follows closely the amount of executive control required in a task, which in turn may relate to dysfunctional top-down bias of the prefrontal cortex arising from unstable task instructions.