title: Age-Related Inter-Region EEG Coupling Changes During the Control of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention.
abstract: We investigated age-related changes in electroencephalographic (EEG) coupling of theta-, alpha-, and beta-frequency bands during bottom-up and top-down attention. Arrays were presented with either automatic "pop-out" (bottom-up) or effortful "search" (top-down) behavior to younger and older participants. The phase-locking value was used to estimate coupling strength between scalp recordings. Behavioral performance decreased with age, with a greater age-related decline in accuracy for the search than for the pop-out condition. Aging was associated with a declined coupling strength of theta and alpha frequency bands, with a greater age-related decline in whole-brain coupling values for the search than for the pop-out condition. Specifically, prefronto-frontal coupling in theta- and alpha-bands, fronto-parietal and parieto-occipital couplings in beta-band for younger group showed a right hemispheric dominance, which was reduced with aging to compensate for the inhibitory dysfunction. While pop-out target detection was mainly associated with greater parieto-occipital beta-coupling strength compared to search condition regardless of aging. Furthermore, prefronto-frontal coupling in theta-, alpha-, and beta-bands, and parieto-occipital coupling in beta-band functioned as predictors of behavior for both groups. Taken together these findings provide evidence that prefronto-frontal coupling of theta-, alpha-, and beta-bands may serve as a possible basis of aging during visual attention, while parieto-occipital coupling in beta-band could serve for a bottom-up function and be vulnerable to top-down attention control for younger and older groups.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Ling
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Dandan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zhao
keywords: aging; alpha; control of attention; electroencephalographic (EEG); inter-region phase coupling; theta; visual pop-out; visual search