Aging-related changes in cognitive flexibility: fMRI meta‐analysis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cognitive flexibility-the ability to adaptively shift between different mental processes-is essential for human functioning. This meta-analysis examines age-related changes in neural correlates of cognitive flexibility using two common assessments: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (rule-discovery) and Task-Switching Paradigm (rule-retrieval). We synthesized findings from 85 articles comprising 118 experiments with 2246 participants across young, middle-age, and older adult groups. Activation Likelihood Estimation analyses revealed an age-related decrease in neural involvement, particularly in posterior regions, with an anterior shift in older adults. Younger adults exhibited bilateral activation patterns while older adults showed left-dominant activity, indicating neural circuit redistribution. Rule-retrieval tasks consistently engaged left-lateralized frontoparietal regions across all age groups, with middle-age adults additionally recruiting the right cerebellum and medial frontal gyrus. For rule-discovery tasks, age-related changes were observed in bilateral frontoparietal regions, with older adults showing unique activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus. These findings highlight differential aging trajectories for rule-retrieval versus rule-discovery processes, reflecting changes in neural mechanisms with aging. Furthermore, middle-age adults recruited additional regions related to conflict monitoring, whereas older adults relied more on planning-related areas, suggesting strategy differences. Our study provides critical insights into the neural underpinnings of cognitive flexibility and its age-related changes, emphasizing the need for research on mechanisms and task-specific age trajectories.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.007 | 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