Dr. Anne Krendl
Indiana University
Talk Title: New insights into aging through the lens of network neuroscience
Abstract: Healthy aging has been widely shown to have deleterious impacts on older adults’ (individuals over the age of 60) cognitive function, including their memory, executive function, and social cognition. Although the mechanisms associated with these declines have been widely studied, numerous questions remain. We thus used a network neuroscience approach to provide new insights into the effects of aging on the structure and function of brain networks. There are two goals of this work: 1) to characterize how older adults’ brain networks differ from young adults’ (individuals between the ages of 18-30) at rest and during task; and 2) to characterize how these differences might affect older adults’ social cognitive function. With respect to the second goal, we focus on two fundamental domains of social decisions-making: theory of mind (inferring others’ mental states) and face perception. Together, these data will reveal more specific mechanisms of how aging impacts social cognitive function.
