Age-Related Differences in Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex BOLD Activity during Cognitive Control Task: An fMRI Study

Cognitive control is used in everyday life to inhibit inherent thoughts and actions to successfully complete a given task. The current investigation used a subset of the overall data set from a larger study (Wilk & Morton, 2012). Participants completed a size-congruency task, while their blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) activity was measured through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Region of interest analyses revealed no significant age-related differences in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) BOLD activation. Nonetheless, the findings of this study confirmed that the left and right dlPFC are indeed involved during cognitive control processing. Additionally, through exploratory analyses, the right inferior frontal junction (IFJ) and right dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC) were revealed to have significant age-related increases in BOLD signal. Future studies should further examine the potential age-related changes in the dlPFC, along with other various brain regions to investigate possible functional networks that may be responsible for cognitive control