Mapping neural mechanisms subserving executive control processes across the adult lifespan: a functional network perspective.

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Executive control functions are high-level cognitive processes that enable humans to direct and sustain their behaviour towards attainment of current and future goals. In everyday life executive control is necessary to maintain and update these goals; inhibit responses to distractions in the environment; and to flexibly adapt behaviour in the context of rapidly changing environmental contingencies. It is now increasingly understood that executive control is the product of interactions amongst many brain regions. As executive control is known to decline across the adult lifespan, it follows that developmental changes within and between functional brain networks may be a neural mechanism underlying changes in cognition from younger to older adulthood. There is preliminary evidence of lifespan developmental changes in functional connectivity within these networks, yet there is little empirical support to date for the hypothesis that alterations within and/or between these networks is related to behavioural changes in executive control capacity. This proposal will (i) characterize lifespan changes occurring at the level of large-scale functional brain networks using an interacting network model of goal-directed cognition (ii) investigate whether these changes are related to behavioural performance on measures of specific executive control processes (working memory, inhibition and task-switching) and (iii) explore whether these functional brain changes are associated with developmental changes in brain structure over the life course.