title: Idiosyncratic responding during movie-watching predicted by age differences in attentional control.
abstract: Much is known about how age affects the brain during tightly controlled, though largely contrived, experiments, but do these effects extrapolate to everyday life? Naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, closely mimic the real world and provide a window onto the brain's ability to respond in a timely and measured fashion to complex, everyday events. Young adults respond to these stimuli in a highly synchronized fashion, but it remains to be seen how age affects neural responsiveness during naturalistic viewing. To this end, we scanned a large (N = 218), population-based sample from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) during movie-watching. Intersubject synchronization declined with age, such that older adults' response to the movie was more idiosyncratic. This decreased synchrony related to cognitive measures sensitive to attentional control. Our findings suggest that neural responsivity changes with age, which likely has important implications for real-world event comprehension and memory.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. Electronic address: karen@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Karen L
authors.initials: KL
authors.lastname: Campbell
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Meredith A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Shafto
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Kamen A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Tsvetanov
authors.affiliation: MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Linda
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Geerligs
authors.affiliation: The Brain and Mind Institute, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Rhodri
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cusack
authors.affiliation: Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN), University of Cambridge and MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Lorraine K
authors.initials: LK
authors.lastname: Tyler
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D003344:Cortical Synchronization / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D008875:Middle Aged; D009040:Motion Pictures; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Aging; Attentional control; Independent components analysis; Intersubject correlation; Natural vision; fMRI