This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Adam Gazzaley at the University of California, San Francisco, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining the neural mechanisms that predict cognitive and brain plasticity in older adults. Cognitive control comprises a set of neural processes that are critical for goal-directed behavior. Non-pathological declines in cognitive control functions are common in healthy older populations, such as pronounced distractibility during working memory performance. There have also been numerous efforts to develop non-invasive methods to enhance cognition in aging, such as cognitive training interventions. However, there is typically heterogeneity in the magnitude of cognitive and neural plasticity across older adults, both in terms of cognitive abilities and training outcomes. The proposed research seeks to identify neural predictors of these individual differences in plasticity in healthy older adults. This work provides important advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of cognitive declines in aging and, importantly, offers methods to ameliorate declines in an optimal, personalized manner.
The proposed research uses fMRI, functional connectivity, and cognitive training to identify neural predictors of individual differences in plasticity in older adults. The project builds on previous lines of work by examining the predictive relationship between brain network properties and (1) short-term plasticity as assessed during cognitive control tasks that tap aspects of selective attention and working memory and (2) long-term plasticity as assessed by training-related cognitive gains. The central hypothesis of this project is that cognitive and neural plasticity in older adults can be predicted by aspects of brain network organization, in particular brain network modularity, a metric that quantifies the degree to which brain regions belonging to the same sub-network are more connected to each other than the rest of the network. The expected outcomes of this research plan are significant because they contribute to our understanding of the neuroscience of cognitive plasticity and, importantly, how these functions can be improved in older adults. More broadly, the outcomes of this proposal further our mechanistic understanding of how properties of large-scale brain networks support complex behaviors. It is anticipated that the outcomes of this proposal serve as a foundation to develop targeted, personalized interventions to enhance cognitive control in older populations.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
