文章基本信息

标题：Bilateral recruitment of prefrontal cortex in working memory is associated with task demand but not with age
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作者：Melanie S. Höller-Wallscheid ; Peter Thier ; Jörn K. Pomper 等
期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2017
卷号：114
期号：5
页码：E830-E839
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1601983114
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Elderly adults may master challenging cognitive demands by additionally recruiting the cross-hemispheric counterparts of otherwise unilaterally engaged brain regions, a strategy that seems to be at odds with the notion of lateralized functions in cerebral cortex. We wondered whether bilateral activation might be a general coping strategy that is independent of age, task content and brain region. While using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we pushed young and old subjects to their working memory (WM) capacity limits in verbal, spatial, and object domains. Then, we compared the fMRI signal reflecting WM maintenance between hemispheric counterparts of various task-relevant cerebral regions that are known to exhibit lateralization. Whereas language-related areas kept their lateralized activation pattern independent of age in difficult tasks, we observed bilaterality in dorsolateral and anterior prefrontal cortex across WM domains and age groups. In summary, the additional recruitment of cross-hemispheric counterparts seems to be an age-independent domain-general strategy to master cognitive challenges. This phenomenon is largely confined to prefrontal cortex, which is arguably less specialized and more flexible than other parts of the brain.
关键词：working memory ; subjective task difficulty ; lateralization ; prefrontal cortex ; cognitive aging