Expertise and Aging: How domain-specific mechanisms escape age-related decline

Musical performance is a complex skill, which is practiced by individuals in all age groups at different levels of accomplishment. Considering that musical performance comprises a wide range of cognitive-motor functions known to decline with age the outstanding levels of performance displayed by older expert musicians present a puzzle. We determined the neural substrates of rhythmic timing control from whole-brain functional scans collected in four groups of young (M=26.09 yr.) and older (M=61.62 yr.) professional musicians and age-matched novice controls (N=20 per group). Behavioral data showed the expected age x expertise interaction with reliable age-related performance declines in the novice group, while older experts maintained young expert levels of performance. At the same time experts and novices performed at similar levels and normal age-related declines in domain-general tasks assessing processing speed, working memory, and cognitive control. fMRI data revealed a domain-general fronto-parietal network in novices, which was increasingly activated for the more complex rhythmic timing tasks. Young and older experts, however, relied on the same premotor and SM1 regions even for the most complex tasks. In line with the expertise-framework our results demonstrate that expert performance rests on domain-specific mechanisms, the development of which can be partly decoupled from domain-general mechanisms. Escaping age-related decline goes a long way, but only for specific skills and only at the cost of high levels of practice intensity maintained throughout the lifespan.status: publishe