Schedule of Events | Symposia

Set-shifting in older age: Insights from of a large cohort.

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Margarita Darna¹ (margarita.darna@lin-magdeburg.de), Constanze I. Seidenbecher^1,2,3,4, Björn H. Schott^1,2,5,6, Anni Richter^1,3,4; ¹Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology (LIN), Magdeburg, Germany, ²Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences (CBBS), Magdeburg, Germany, ³German Center for Mental Health (DZPG), partner site Halle-Jena-Magdeburg, ⁴Center for Intervention and Research on adaptive and maladaptive brain Circuits underlying mental health (C-I-R-C), Halle-Jena-Magdeburg, ⁵German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Göttingen, Germany, ⁶Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

With aging, the brain undergoes structural and functional changes and many cognitive functions show both decline and adaptation. One such function is set-shifting, an executive function crucial for daily life. Previous studies on set-shifting in old age have reported somewhat inconclusive results on both behavioral changes and on the underlying neural mechanisms. Here, we aimed to elucidate neurocognitive correlates of set-shifting in older adults using behavioral, electrophysiological, and biochemical measures. To this end, we recruited a large cohort of 122 young (18 to 35 years) and 100 older participants (60 to 85 years), that was tested using in an EEG compatible set-shifting task. Our key findings are: 1) older adults showed increased switch costs in reaction times but reduced overall error rates compared to young adults , 2) older adults had overall lower midfrontal theta power which lacked modulation during set-shifting and 3) older adults lacked amplitude differences in the late posterior switch positivity across distinct set-shifting difficulty levels. Our findings suggest that theta modulation during cognitive control declines with age and that alternative neural resources might instead be recruited. Thus, older adults can still successfully set-shift, albeit without showing theta modulation as a function of varying set-shifting difficulty levels. We additionally plan to present preliminary results on age-related differences in gamma oscillations and biochemical measures of extracellular matrix integrity as a potential factor influencing set-shifting in older age.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Development &aging