Resting-state anticorrelations between medial and lateral prefrontal cortex: Association with working memory, aging, and individual differences

Abstract

We examined how variation in working memory (WM) capacity due to aging or individual differences among young adults is associated with intrinsic or resting-state anticorrelations, particularly between (1) the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a component of the default-mode network (DMN) that typically decreases in activation during external, attention-demanding tasks, and (2) the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a component of the fronto-parietal control network that supports executive functions and WM and typically increases in activation during attention-demanding tasks. We compared the magnitudes of MPFC-DLPFC anticorrelations between healthy younger and older participants (Experiment 1) and related the magnitudes of these anticorrelations to individual differences on two behavioral measures of working memory capacity in two independent groups of young adults (Experiments 1 and 2). Relative to younger adults, older adults exhibited reductions in working memory capacity and in MPFC-DLPFC anticorrelations. Within younger adults, greater MPFC-DLPFC anticorrelation at rest correlated with greater working memory capacity. These findings show that variation in MPFC-DLPFC anticorrelations, whether related to aging or to individual differences, may reflect an intrinsic functional brain architecture supportive of working memory capacity.

Age differences in the neural correlates of distraction regulation: A network interaction approach

“…These age differences in associations were observed despite of a lack of group difference in the average DAN-DMN anticorrelation score, which has been reported in previous studies (e.g., Keller et al, 2015;Spreng et al, 2016). This lack of average group difference may possibly be related to the nature of the task used, as various task demands have been shown to influence the degree of the networks' anticorrelation (e.g., Leech, Kamourieh, Beckman, & Sharp, 2011).…”

Metabolic Connectivity as Index of Verbal Working Memory

“…This approach seems suitable to model brain connectivity, because past studies showed the true brain networks to be sparse. 22 As discussed in detail elsewhere, 23,24 increasing evidence from fMRI research suggests that WM performance may be mediated by functional connectivity of both task-negative networks, such as DMN and task-positive networks. The specificity of this relationship with respect to the material type (i.e., object, spatial, verbal) and degree of executive function involved (i.e., with executive processing or storage only) is not yet known.…”

Attenuated anticorrelation between the default and dorsal attention networks with aging: evidence from task and rest

“…Chan and colleagues (2014) observed increased FC between default and dorsal attention brain regions with increasing age, although they excluded negative correlations from their analyses owing to concerns with GSR. More recently, reduced anticorrelations, limited to regions of medial and lateral prefrontal cortex, were observed in older versus younger adults during rest (Keller et al, 2015). Greater anticorrelation between MPFC and lateral PFC brain regions was associated with better cognitive performance in young adults; however, no behavioral associations were observed in older adults leaving the question open as to whether changes to the anticorrelation dynamic indicate age-related cognitive decline.…”

“…However, the use of mean global signal regression (GSR) in these studies may have altered the interregional correlation differences between groups (Murphy, Birn, Handwerker, Jones, & Bandettini, 2009; Saad et al, 2012), complicating the interpretation of negative correlation values (Gotts et al, 2013). More recently, preprocessing procedures that do not rely on GSR have revealed that the antagonism between medial and lateral prefrontal cortex is attenuated in older adults (Keller et al, 2015), but age-related changes in anticorrelation between the dorsal attention and default networks more broadly have not been reported.…”