Cognitive reserves hold back age-related upregulation of neural activities in speech-in-noise perception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract During cognitive tasks, increased frontoparietal neural activity and functional connectivity are commonly observed in older adults. Cognitive reserves accrued from positive life choices can provide additional neural resources to cope with aging. However, how cognitive reserves interact with upregulated neural activity in older adults is poorly understood. We measured brain activity with fMRI during a speech-in-noise task and assessed whether cognitive reserve accumulated from long-term musical training bolsters or holds back age-related upregulated activity. Older musicians exhibited less upregulation of task-induced functional connectivity than older non-musicians in auditory dorsal regions, which predicted better behavioral performance in older musicians. These results suggest that cognitive reserve may hold back neural recruitment. Besides functional connectivity strength, we also found that older musicians showed more youth-like fine spatial patterns of functional connectivity than older non-musicians. Our findings enlightened the intricate interplay between cognitive reserve and age-related upregulated activity during speech in noise perception. Significance Statement Understanding the interplay between cognitive reserve and age-related neural changes is vital for developing strategies to mitigate cognitive decline in older adults. This study reveals that long-term musical training, which provides cognitive reserve for speech perception, helps older musicians preserve youth-like levels of functional connectivity and fine-scale activity patterns in the auditory dorsal stream during speech-in-noise perception. Unlike older non-musicians, who exhibit age-related neural upregulation, older musicians maintain youth-like connectivity patterns akin to those of younger adults, resulting in superior speech-in-noise perception. These findings support the "Hold-back upregulation" hypothesis and suggest that musical training counteracts age-related declines by preserving youthful brain function. The results offer valuable insights for designing interventions to enhance aging populations’ cognitive function and communication abilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".