The Adaptive Brain: Aging and Neurocognitive Scaffolding

By Denise C. Park, Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz. Annual Review of Psychology, 2009

2,657 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There are declines with age in speed of processing, working memory, inhibitory function, and long-term memory, as well as decreases in brain structure size and white matter integrity. In the face of these decreases, functional imaging studies have demonstrated, somewhat surprisingly, reliable increases in prefrontal activation. To account for these joint phenomena, we propose the scaffolding theory of aging and cognition (STAC). STAC provides an integrative view of the aging mind, suggesting that pervasive increased frontal activation with age is a marker of an adaptive brain that engages in compensatory scaffolding in response to the challenges posed by declining neural structures and function. Scaffolding is a normal process present across the lifespan that involves use and development of complementary, alternative neural circuits to achieve a particular cognitive goal. Scaffolding is protective of cognitive function in the aging brain, and available evidence suggests that the ability to use this mechanism is strengthened by cognitive engagement, exercise, and low levels of default network engagement.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ae00787ca3f2f374bf0f1400b22d665b7fffa3b

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Neural mechanisms of ageing and cognitive decline (2010, background): “In addition to being less integrated, neural activity also becomes less localized in some brain regions, particularly the prefrontal cortex, in response to executive-level task”
Aging, training, and the brain: A review and future directions (2009, positive): “…described above, as training progresses, we would expect older adults' processing to become more young-adult-like, such that reliance on additional processes and their associated regions of activation—which may serve a scaffolding purpose (c.f., Park and Reuter-Lorenz 2009)— would decrease.”
Network centrality in the human functional connectome. (2012, neutral): “a global level (Park and Reuter-Lorenz 2009).”
Growing together and growing apart: Regional and sex differences in the lifespan developmental trajectories of functional homotopy (2010, background): “Based on evidence of decreasing lateralization in normal aging (Cabeza et al., 2002; Buckner, 2004; Li et al., 2009; Park and Reuter-Lorenz, 2009), we also predicted quadratic or cubic age-related changes in homotopic RSFC.”
Decreased segregation of brain systems across the healthy adult lifespan (2014, background): “It is uncertain whether these changes reflect age-associated strategic differences in task engagement, or they are obligatory differences in response to the ongoing cascade of white-matter and gray-matter brain changes that occur in even very healthy older adults (47, 48).”
A Brain-Wide Study of Age-Related Changes in Functional Connectivity. (2015, background): “In addition to functional changes, aging is known to be related to changes in underlying brain structure (Park and Reuter-Lorenz 2009).”
Organisation of executive functions: Hemispheric asymmetries (2012, background): “An overrecruitment of such a bilateral network has been shown to have, in certain circumstances, a compensatory role in normal ageing, especially under difficult and novel task-conditions (Cabeza, Anderson, Locantore, & McIntosh, 2002; Park & Reuter-Lorenz, 2009; Vallesi, McIntosh, & Stuss, 2011).”
What is normal in normal aging? Effects of Aging, Amyloid and Alzheimer’s Disease on the Cerebral Cortex and the Hippocampus (2014, background): “…in aging by compensatory cognitive processes, and that decline is seen when a person is no longer able to compensate for reduced workings of primary brain structures and circuits, has many supporters in contemporary research (Cabeza et al., 2002; Park and Reuter-Lorenz, 2009; Grady, 2012).”