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Neural and Cardiovascular Determinants of Tip-of-The-Tongue States in Healthy Ageing
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Poster D8 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Katrien Segaert1, Kamen Tsvetanov2, Jack Feron1, Kelsey Joyce1, Ahmed Gilani1, Eunice Fernandes3, Allison Wetterlin3, Linda Wheeldon3, Sam Lucas1, Foyzul Rahman1; 1University of Birmingham, UK, 2University of Cambridge, UK, 3University of Agder, Norway
Introduction: Tip-of-the-tongue occurrences, a temporary inability to access a known word, are common in healthy older adults. Existing imaging studies have linked these occurrences to structural and functional differences associated with healthy ageing. Lifestyle factors, such as cardiorespiratory fitness, have also been linked to tip-of-the-tongues among older adults. However, the integration of neuroimaging and cardiorespiratory measures in understanding these failures is currently lacking. Here, for the first time, we report how brain-based and lifestyle factors both uniquely and synergistically explain word-finding failures experienced by older adults. We assessed the effects of age, grey matter density, cardiorespiratory fitness, cerebral perfusion, and fMRI BOLD effects to explain tip-of-the-tongue occurrences in healthy older adults. Methods: 78 right-handed healthy older adults (Mage = 65.53, range 60-81; 39/39 male/female) completed a definition-based tip-of-the-tongue-fMRI, T1-weighted anatomical, and cerebral perfusion (pseudo-continuous arterial spin labelling) MRI sequences. Separately, we collected cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2 peak) data using an incremental treadmill test. BOLD-fMRI data were modelled on ‘Tip-of-the-tongue' vs ‘Know’ responses and standard FSL preprocessing was applied to structural and perfusion data. We examined the link between brain and fitness measures as predictors of tip-of-the-tongues using a commonality analysis. Commonality analysis is a statistical approach that decomposes variance in a dependent variable (here, tip-of-the-tongues) into unique variance that is native to each predictor in the model while also computing the shared variance apportioned to two or more predictors; referred to unique and common variance, respectively. Results: Whole-brain results revealed a functional tip-of-the-tongue network (Tip-of-the-tongue >Know), which included the bilateral inferior frontal, superior frontal and angular gyri, the left planum temporale, temporal pole and right posterior middle temporal gyrus. Commonality analysis revealed that tip-of-the-tongue occurrences were best explained by a synergistic effect of age, fitness, and functional recruitment (e.g., precuneus). This suggests that age and individual differences in fitness explained variance in tip-of-the-tongue rates, and fitness was associated with differential recruitment of language regions. These findings persisted above and beyond contributions of loss in brain structure (atrophy). We found that age-related atrophy in the hippocampus also explained variability in TOT rates. We did not find an association with perfusion surviving correction for multiple comparisons. Conclusion: Individual differences in fitness in ageing was associated with differential recruitment of tip-of-the-tongue functional networks. This differential recruitment explained the variance observed in tip-of-the-tongue rates. Moreover, the conjunction of age, cardiorespiratory fitness, and functional recruitment determined tip-of-the-tongue rates above and beyond contributions of atrophy and brain perfusion.
Topic Areas: Language Production,