Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Attentional Control in the Aging Brain

Prakash, Ruchika Shaurya; Voss, Michelle W.; Erickson, Kirk I.; Lewis, Jason M.; Chaddock, Laura; Malkowski, Edward; Alves, Heloisa; Kim, Jennifer; Amanda N. Szabo‐Reed; White, Siobhan M.; Wójcicki, Thomas R.; Klamm, Emily L.; McAuley, Edward; Kramer, Arthur F. · 2011 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2010.00229

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Summary

This study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and attentional control in healthy older adults. Motivated by evidence that aerobic exercise mitigates cognitive decline, the researchers sought to determine if higher fitness levels are associated with enhanced recruitment of specific neural circuits during attentional tasks. Specifically, the study examined whether fitness influences the differential recruitment of anterior processing regions (prefrontal and parietal cortices) versus posterior sensory regions during a modified Stroop task, which requires top-down control to ignore irrelevant semantic information. The study involved 70 community-dwelling older adults (mean age 65) who underwent maximal graded exercise testing and a sub-maximal field test to assess cardiorespiratory fitness, resulting in a composite fitness score (zFIT). Participants performed a modified Stroop task during 3T functional MRI scanning. The task included congruent, neutral, and two incongruent conditions: "incongruent-eligible" (high conflict, where the word was a possible response) and "incongruent-ineligible" (lower conflict). Localizer scans identified individual color-sensitive and word-sensitive regions in the ventral visual cortex to analyze posterior modulation. Statistical analyses controlled for age, gender, education, verbal intelligence, and gray matter volume. Behavioral results indicated that the incongruent-eligible condition was the most challenging, yielding slower reaction times and higher error rates. Higher cardiorespiratory fitness was significantly associated with faster reaction times and fewer errors in this most demanding condition. Neuroimaging results revealed that while older adults generally failed to up-regulate cortical resources for the high-conflict condition compared to the lower-conflict condition, higher fitness levels were associated with increased recruitment of bilateral prefrontal cortices (middle and inferior frontal gyri) and the left superior parietal lobule specifically in the contrast between eligible and ineligible trials. This suggests that fit older adults possess a greater capacity to up-regulate anterior cortical resources in response to increasing task demands. Conversely, fitness was not associated with differential activation in posterior processing regions, although top-down modulation of extrastriate visual areas was observed. The findings provide novel evidence that cardiorespiratory fitness enhances attentional function in aging primarily by influencing the neural circuitry of anterior cortical regions responsible for executive control. Rather than causing a general increase in prefrontal activation across all conditions, fitness is associated with the ability to dynamically increase recruitment of these regions when cognitive demands are highest. This highlights a specific neural mechanism through which aerobic fitness may protect against age-related cognitive decline, emphasizing the role of neuronal flexibility in anterior processing networks.

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• cognitive impairment