Cooperation and competition between the default mode network and frontal parietal network in the elderly

Hideya Koshino; Mariko Osaka; Tetsuya Shimokawa; Mizuki Kaneda; Seira Taniguchi; Takehiro Minamoto; Ken Yaoi; Miyuki Azuma; Katsuki Higo; Naoyuki Osaka

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1140399

Cooperation and competition between the default mode network and frontal parietal network in the elderly

Front Psychol. 2023 May 19:14:1140399. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1140399. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, California State University, San Bernardino, CA, United States.
² Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka, Japan.
³ Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Suita, Osaka, Japan.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.

Abstract

Recent research has shown that the Default Mode Network (DMN) typically exhibits increased activation during processing of social and personal information but shows deactivation during working memory (WM) tasks. Previously, we reported the Frontal Parietal Network (FPN) and DMN showed coactivation during task preparation whereas the DMN exhibited deactivation during task execution in working memory tasks. Aging research has shown that older adults exhibited decreased functional connectivity in the DMN relative to younger adults. Here, we investigated whether age-related cognitive decline is related to a reduced relationship between the FPN and DMN using a working memory task during the execution period. First, we replicated our previous finding that the FPN and DMN showed coactivation during the preparation period, whereas the DMN showed deactivation during the execution period. The older adults showed reduced DMN activity during task preparation and reduced deactivation during task execution; however, they exhibited a higher magnitude of activation in the FPN than the young individuals during task execution. Functional connectivity analyses showed that the elderly group, compared to the young group, showed weaker correlations within the FPN and the DMN, weaker positive correlations between the FPN and DMN during task preparation, and weaker negative correlations between the FPN and DMN during execution. The results suggest that cognitive decline in the older adults might be related to reduced connectivity within the DMN as well as between the FPN and DMN.

Keywords: DMN; FPN; aging; functional connectivity; working memory.