Age- and Episodic Memory-related Differences in Task-based Functional Connectivity in Women and Men

摘要

Aging is associated with episodic memory decline andchanges in functional brain connectivity. Understandingwhether and how biological sex influences age- and memoryperformance-related functional connectivity has important theoreticalimplications for the cognitive neuroscience of memoryand aging. Here, we scanned 161 healthy adults between 19 and76 years of age in an event-related fMRI study of face–locationspatial context memory. Adults were scanned while performingeasy and difficult versions of the task at both encoding andretrieval. We used multivariate whole-brain partial least squaresconnectivity to test the hypothesis that there are sex differencesin age- and episodic memory performance-related functionalconnectivity. We examined how individual differences in ageand retrieval accuracy correlated with task-related connectivity.We then repeated this analysis after disaggregating the data byself-reported sex. We found that increased encoding andretrieval-related connectivity within the dorsal attention network(DAN), and between DAN and frontoparietal networkand visual networks, were positively correlated to retrieval accuracyand negatively correlated with age in both sexes. We alsoobserved sex differences in age- and performance-related functionalconnectivity: (a) Greater between-networks integrationwas apparent at both levels of task difficulty in women only,and (b) increased DAN–default mode network connectivitywith age was observed in men and was correlated with poorermemory performance. Therefore, the neural correlates ofage-related episodic memory decline differ in women andmen and have important theoretical and clinical implicationsfor the cognitive neuroscience of memory, aging, and dementiaprevention.