Age-related changes in cognitive flexibility: fMRI meta‐analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To examine neural mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility changes with ageing, we synthesized findings from 87 fMRI studies, comprising 120 experiments with 2308 adult participants distributed across young, middle-age, and older groups. Our meta-analysis was focused on rule-retrieval and rule-discovery processes, assessed with Task-Switching Paradigm and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, respectively. Activation Likelihood Estimation analyses revealed age-related decreases in brain activation related to general switching ability, particularly in posterior regions, alongside an anterior shift in older adults, consistent with the Posterior-Anterior Shift in Aging (PASA) model. 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 decline was observed in bilateral frontoparietal regions, while older adults also showed unique activation in the left inferior-frontal gyrus. These findings highlight differential ageing trajectories for rule retrieval and rule discovery, potentially reflecting compensatory neural mechanisms and dedifferentiation processes.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".