The present study investigated whether neural structures become less functionally differentiated and specialized with age. We studied ventral visual cortex, an area of the brain that responds selectively to visual categories (faces, places, and words) in young adults, and that shows little atrophy with age. Functional MRI was used to estimate neural activity in this cortical area, while young and old adults viewed faces, houses, pseudowords, and chairs. The results demonstrated significantly less neural specialization for these stimulus categories in older adults across a range of analyses. There is growing behavioral evidence that the functional architecture of cognition becomes dedifferentiated with age: A number of studies have found that correlations among distinct measures of cognitive function are more intercorrelated in older subjects than in younger adult subjects (1-5). Furthermore, markers of central sensory function (e.g., corrected visual and auditory acuity) account for virtually all age-related variance on a broad array of higher-order cognitive tasks, including speed of processing, memory, verbal fluency, and reasoning (4, 6). Based on these and related findings, Baltes and Lindenberger (6) argued that aging reduces the degree to which behavior is specialized (or differentiated) for individual tasks and that a domain-independent decline in neural integrity is the mechanism underlying this dedifferentiation. Providing a more specific mechanism for dedifferentiation, Li et al. (7) have argued that both empirical and computational data suggest that increased age results in a decrease in distinctiveness of neural representations due to deficient dopaminergic modulation. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, the dedifferentiation hypothesis can be addressed more directly than is possible with behavioral techniques alone. Thus, in the present study, we test whether neural structures become dedifferentiated with age, by examining the degree of category-specificity that is present in ventral visual cortex in young and old adults.

Although tailored health interventions can be more effective in eliciting positive behavior change then generic interventions, the underlying neural mechanisms are not yet understood. Ninety-one smokers participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session and a tailored smoking-cessation program. We found that increases in activations in self-related processing regions, particularly dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, to tailored messages predicted quitting during a 4-month follow-up.

Current theories of cognitive aging argue that neural representations become less distinctive in old age, a phenomenon known as dedifferentiation. The present study used multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to measure age differences in the distinctiveness of distributed patterns of neural activation evoked by different categories of visual images. We found that neural activation patterns within the ventral visual cortex were less distinctive among older adults. Further, we report that age differences in neural distinctiveness extend beyond the ventral visual cortex: older adults also showed decreased distinctiveness in early visual cortex, inferior parietal cortex, and medial and lateral prefrontal cortex. Neural distinctiveness scores in early and late visual areas were highly correlated, suggesting shared mechanisms of age-related decline. Finally, we investigated whether older adults can compensate for altered processing in visual cortex by encoding stimulus information across larger numbers of voxels within the visual cortex or in regions outside visual cortex. We found no evidence that older adults can increase the distinctiveness of distributed activation patterns, either within or beyond the visual cortex. Our results have important implications for theories of cognitive aging and highlight the value of MVPA to the study of neural coding in the aging brain.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate whether semantic judgments about products and persons are processed similarly. Our results suggest they are not: comparisons of neural correlates of product versus human descriptor judgments indicated greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex regions for persons; for products, activation was greater in the left inferior prefrontal cortex, an area known to be involved in object processing. These findings serve to challenge the view that processing of products and brands is akin to that of humans and set a precedent for the use of fMRI techniques in consumer neuroscience studies. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Previous studies have found that cortical responses to different stimuli become less distinctive as people get older. This age-related dedifferentiation may reflect the broadening of the tuning curves of category-selective neurons (broadening hypothesis) or it may be due to decreased activation of category-selective neurons (attenuation hypothesis). In this study, we evaluated these hypotheses in the context of the face-selective neural network. Over 300 participants, ranging in age from 20 to 89 years, viewed images of faces, houses, and control stimuli in a functional magnetic resonance imaging session. Regions within the core face network and extended face network were identified in individual subjects. Activation in many of these regions became significantly less face-selective with age, confirming previous reports of age-related dedifferentiation. Consistent with the broadening hypothesis, this dedifferentiation in the fusiform face area (FFA) was driven by increased activation to houses. In contrast, dedifferentiation in the extended face network was driven by decreased activation to faces, consistent with the attenuation hypothesis. These results suggest that age-related dedifferentiation reflects distinct processes in different brain areas. More specifically, dedifferentiation in FFA activity may be due to broadening of the tuning curves for face-selective neurons, while dedifferentiation in the extended face network reflects reduced face- or emotion-selective activity.