Developing Topics.

Background: Measures of cardiovascular health have long been associated with brain health. For example, aerobic capacity (VO2max) is associated with preservation of functional and structural brain integrity in later life. Recent work has highlighted the utility of relative brain age (RBA; the age-corrected difference between a brain's chronological and estimated biological ages) to examine the rate of biological brain aging.

Age, Motion, Medical, and Psychiatric Associations With Incidental Findings in Brain MRI.

Importance: Few investigations have evaluated rates of brain-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) incidental findings (IFs) in large lifespan samples, their stability over time, or their associations with health outcomes.

Objectives: To examine rates of brain-based IFs across the lifespan, their persistence, and their associations with phenotypic indicators of behavior, cognition, and health; to compare quantified motion with radiologist-reported motion and evaluate its associations with IF rates; and to explore IF consistency across multiple visits.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study included participants from the Nathan Kline Institute-Rockland Sample (NKI-RS), a lifespan community-ascertained sample, and the Healthy Brain Network (HBN), a cross-sectional community self-referred pediatric sample focused on mental health and learning disorders.

A longitudinal resource for studying connectome development and its psychiatric associations during childhood.

Most psychiatric disorders are chronic, associated with high levels of disability and distress, and present during pediatric development. Scientific innovation increasingly allows researchers to probe brain-behavior relationships in the developing human. As a result, ambitions to (1) establish normative pediatric brain development trajectories akin to growth curves, (2) characterize reliable metrics for distinguishing illness, and (3) develop clinically useful tools to assist in the diagnosis and management of mental health and learning disorders have gained significant momentum.

Effect of aerobic exercise on cognition in younger adults: A randomized clinical trial.

Objective: To determine efficacy of aerobic exercise for cognitive function in younger healthy adults.

Methods: In a randomized, parallel-group, observer-masked, community-based clinical trial, 132 cognitively normal individuals aged 20-67 with below median aerobic capacity were randomly assigned to one of two 6-month, 4-times-weekly conditions: aerobic exercise and stretching/toning. Efficacy measures included aerobic capacity; cognitive function in several domains (executive function, episodic memory, processing speed, language, and attention), everyday function, body mass index (BMI), and cortical thickness.

Mood and Personality Characteristics are Associated with Metamemory Knowledge Accuracy in a Community-Based Cohort of Older Adults.

Objectives: Emerging work reveals the neuroanatomic changes that compromise metacognition; however, little is known about the impact of premorbid factors. Research suggests that psychological variables influence the perception of cognition, but whether they influence the accuracy of those perceptions (i.e.

The real-time fMRI neurofeedback based stratification of Default Network Regulation Neuroimaging data repository.

This data descriptor describes a repository of openly shared data from an experiment to assess inter-individual differences in default mode network (DMN) activity. This repository includes cross-sectional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from the Multi Source Interference Task, to assess DMN deactivation, the Moral Dilemma Task, to assess DMN activation, a resting state fMRI scan, and a DMN neurofeedback paradigm, to assess DMN modulation, along with accompanying behavioral and cognitive measures. We report technical validation from n=125 participants of the final targeted sample of 180 participants.

Age-Based Differences in Task Switching Are Moderated by Executive Control Demands.

Objectives: Recent work has identified different aspects of executive function that may underlie cognitive changes associated with age. The current study used a multifactorial design to investigate age sensitivity in the ability to shift between different task sets and the interaction of this ability with several specific aspects of executive control.

Method: A large, well-characterized sample of younger (n = 40) and clinically healthy older (n = 51) adults completed a task switching paradigm in which 3 aspects of executive control were manipulated between subjects: a) sensorimotor demand (the number of distinct stimulus-response options); b) stimulus-level interference (i.

Differential profiles in auditory social cognition deficits between adults with autism and schizophrenia spectrum disorders: A preliminary analysis.

Impairment in social cognition, including emotion recognition, has been extensively studied in both Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and Schizophrenia (SZ). However, the relative patterns of deficit between disorders have been studied to a lesser degree. Here, we applied a social cognition battery incorporating both auditory (AER) and visual (VER) emotion recognition measures to a group of 19 high-functioning individuals with ASD relative to 92 individuals with SZ, and 73 healthy control adult participants.

Effects of education and race on cognitive decline: An integrative study of generalizability versus study-specific results.

The objective of the study was to examine variability across multiple prospective cohort studies in level and rate of cognitive decline by race/ethnicity and years of education. We compare data across studies, we harmonized estimates of common latent factors representing overall or general cognitive performance, memory, and executive function derived from the: (a) Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Inwood Columbia Aging Project (N = 4,115), (b) Spanish and English Neuropsychological Assessment Scales (N = 525), (c) Duke Memory, Health, and Aging study (N = 578), and (d) Neurocognitive Outcomes of Depression in the Elderly (N = 585). We modeled cognitive change over age for cognitive outcomes by race, education, and study.

Life experience and demographic influences on cognitive function in older adults.

Objective: We examined the influence of a broad spectrum of life experiences on longitudinal cognitive trajectories in a demographically diverse sample of older adults.

Method: Participants were 333 educationally, ethnically, and cognitively diverse older adults enrolled in a longitudinal aging study. Mixed-effects regression was used to measure baseline status in episodic memory, executive functioning, and semantic memory and change in a global cognition factor defined by change in these 3 domain-specific measures.

Unilateral disruptions in the default network with aging in native space.

Background: Disruption of the default-mode network (DMN) in healthy elders has been reported in many studies.

Methods: In a group of 51 participants (25 young, 26 elder) we examined DMN connectivity in subjects' native space. In the native space method, subject-specific regional masks (obtained independently for each subject) are used to extract regional fMRI times series.

Early life development in a multiethnic sample and the relation to late life cognition.

Objectives: Poor quality of early life conditions has been associated with poorer late life cognition and increased risk of dementia. Early life physical development can be captured using adult measures of height and head circumference. Availability of resources may be reflected by socioeconomic indicators, such as parental education and family size.

Cognitive declines precede and predict functional declines in aging and Alzheimer's disease.

Objective: To investigate the temporal ordering of cognitive and functional declines separately in older adults with or without Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Design And Setting: A community-based longitudinal study of aging and dementia in Northern Manhattan (Washington Heights/Hamilton Heights Inwood Columbia Aging Project) and a multicenter, clinic-based longitudinal study of prevalent AD at Columbia University Medical Center, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris, France (the Predictors Study).

Participants: 3,443 initially non-demented older adults (612 with eventual incident dementia) and 517 patients with AD.

Application of a cognitive neuroscience perspective of cognitive control to late-life anxiety.

Recent evidence supports a negative association between anxiety and cognitive control. Given age-related reductions in some cognitive abilities and the relation of late life anxiety to cognitive impairment, this negative association may be particularly relevant to older adults. This critical review conceptualizes anxiety and cognitive control from cognitive neuroscience and cognitive aging theoretical perspectives and evaluates the methodological approaches and measures used to assess cognitive control.

Training attentional control in older adults.

Recent research has demonstrated benefits for older adults from training attentional control using a variable priority strategy, but the construct validity of the training task and the degree to which benefits of training transfer to other contexts are unclear. The goal of this study was to characterize baseline performance on the training task in a sample of 105 healthy older adults and to test for transfer of training in a subset (n = 21). Training gains after 5 days and extent of transfer was compared to another subset (n = 20) that served as a control group.

A novel interface for interactive exploration of DTI fibers.

Visual exploration is essential to the visualization and analysis of densely sampled 3D DTI fibers in biological specimens, due to the high geometric, spatial, and anatomical complexity of fiber tracts. Previous methods for DTI fiber visualization use zooming, color-mapping, selection, and abstraction to deliver the characteristics of the fibers. However, these schemes mainly focus on the optimization of visualization in the 3D space where cluttering and occlusion make grasping even a few thousand fibers difficult.