Aging and the wandering brain: Age-related differences in the neural correlates of stimulus-independent thoughts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, several studies have indicated that healthy older adults exhibit a reduction in task-unrelated thoughts compared to young adults. However, much less is known regarding age-related differences in time spent engaging in stimulus-independent thoughts or in their neural correlates in the absence of an ongoing task. In the current study, we collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while 29 young (mean age = 22y) and 22 older (mean age = 70y) adults underwent experience sampling in the absence of an ongoing task (i.e., at "rest"). Although both age groups reported spending a similar amount of time engaged in stimulus-independent thoughts, older adults rated their thoughts as more present-oriented (rather than atemporal) and more novel. Moreover, controlling for these age-related differences in content, we found that experiencing stimulus-independent thoughts was associated with increased posterior cingulate and left angular gyrus activation across age groups compared to exhibiting an external focus of attention. When experiencing stimulus-independent thoughts, younger adults engaged medial and left lateral prefrontal cortex as well as left superior temporal gyrus to a greater degree than older adults. Taken together, our results suggest that, in the absence of an ongoing task, although young and older adults spend a similar amount of time engaging in stimulus-independent thoughts, the content and neural correlates of these thoughts differ with age.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".