Idiosyncratic responding during movie-watching predicted by age differences in attentional control
DOI: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2015.07.028
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Summary
This study investigates whether age-related declines in attentional control affect neural responsiveness during naturalistic, real-world tasks, specifically movie-watching. While previous research has established that young adults exhibit highly synchronized neural responses to complex stimuli, it remained unclear how aging impacts this intersubject synchronization. The authors hypothesized that older adults, who typically exhibit reduced attentional control and greater susceptibility to distraction, would show more idiosyncratic (less synchronized) neural responses compared to younger adults. To test this, the researchers analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from a large, population-based sample of 218 participants aged 18 to 88 years from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN). Participants watched an edited version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Bang! You’re Dead” while undergoing scanning. The study employed independent components analysis (ICA) to identify ten major functional networks (including auditory, visual, language, and default mode networks) and calculated intersubject synchronization by correlating individual network timecourses with the group average. Additionally, a supplementary region-of-interest (ROI) analysis was conducted using 840 brain regions to verify findings. Participants also completed cognitive tasks measuring fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and reaction time (RT) variability to assess attentional control. The results demonstrated that intersubject synchronization declined significantly with age across all ten identified functional networks. Older adults exhibited more variable and idiosyncratic neural responses to the movie compared to the highly synchronized responses of younger adults. This decline in synchrony was observed in both the temporal and spatial dimensions and persisted after controlling for head motion and education. The ROI analysis confirmed these findings, showing reduced synchronization in older adults in regions such as the middle occipital cortex, intraparietal sulcus, and anterior cingulate. Crucially, individual differences in synchronization were positively correlated with measures of attentional control: higher synchronization was associated with better fluid intelligence scores and lower reaction time variability. Conversely, synchronization did not correlate with crystallized intelligence or mean reaction time, which are less dependent on attentional control. These findings suggest that aging alters neural responsiveness to naturalistic stimuli, leading to less shared neural processing across individuals. The link between reduced synchronization and poorer attentional control implies that age-related declines in the ability to sustain focus and filter distractions may underlie these neural changes. The authors conclude that these shifts in neural responsivity likely have significant implications for how older adults comprehend and remember real-world events, highlighting the importance of studying brain function in ecologically valid contexts rather than solely in controlled laboratory settings.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | OpenAlex-citations | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| archive | success | openalex | — | — | 5 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-25 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-18 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified.
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