Recent Findings from Columbia University Has Provided New Information about Cognitive Neuroscience (Cross-sectional and Longitudinal Age-related Disintegration In Functional Connectivity: Reference Ability Neural Network Cohort).

A recent report from Columbia University discusses research findings on cognitive neuroscience and age-related cognitive decline. The study challenges the dedifferentiation hypothesis, which suggests that cognitive decline is linked to a reduction in distinctiveness of neural processing. Instead, the study supports an alternative disintegration hypothesis, showing that age-related changes in neural representations over time are associated with cognitive decline. The research was conducted on a longitudinal sample of 135 participants and found that older adults showed higher behavioral validity, driven by lower between-tasks correlations. The study also found that changes in neural validity partially mediated the effect of age on changes in global cognition. [Extracted from the article]