Aperiodic EEG activity is a domain-specific marker of attentional aging in neurotypical adults

Résumé fourni par la source

Aperiodic neural activity has been reliably shown to be reduced among older adults, and these reductions are associated with age-related cognitive decline. These results suggest that aperiodic activity, as measured by the spectral exponent, might be a viable electrophysiological biomarker for cognitive aging. However, this has not been tested longitudinally, within participants, during normal aging. Here, we used a longitudinal cohort to test whether changes in aperiodic activity between two sessions, approximately 5 years apart, track behavioral change across two domains: sustained attention (Psychomotor Vigilance Test) and executive function (modified Simon task). We found that aperiodic activity declined within individuals after the interval, independent of age at baseline. This within-person change tracked concurrent changes in reaction times during visual attention but was not associated with changes in any Simon task measure. Within a resampling framework, the aperiodic-PVT association was stable across cohort resamples and independently fitted partitions, though it was not confirmed in a small, frozen held-out set. These findings suggest the longitudinal decline in aperiodic activity specifically tracks sustained-attention processing speed rather than general cognitive aging, supporting its potential as a domain-specific biomarker of attentional aging in neurotypical populations.

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