Parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems interactively predict change in cognitive functioning in midlife adults
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The two branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) have been individually linked to changes in cognitive functioning: The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) has been associated with healthy cognitive aging, whereas excessive sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity has been linked to heightened cognitive decline. Despite these separate findings and despite the integrative nature of the ANS, little work has examined the two branches simultaneously to better understand their interactive effects on changes in cognitive functioning in midlife adults. We examined cognitive change in two waves of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study cognitive project and indexed PNS and SNS activity from heart rate variability and epinephrine levels, respectively, from the MIDUS biomarker project (minimum n = 843, 57.9% female, mean age at first wave = 53.8 years). Our findings indicate that greater PNS responsivity (i.e., greater withdrawal and greater recovery) in response to cognitive challenge is associated with attenuated cognitive decline, but only among individuals with low SNS levels; at higher SNS levels, the effects of the PNS on cognitive decline are attenuated. These results suggest that future research targeting the ANS and cognitive aging should consider both ANS branch's effects simultaneously.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 it