While participants were lying in the MRI scanner, they performed tasks with actual 3D tools. The paradigm allowed to analyze brain activity, both in response to the planning and the execution phase, of these real complex object manipulation tasks.
Our data indicates that the left-hemispheric tool-use network, which seems to be particularly important for tool-related tasks and includes occipital, temporal, parietal as well as frontal regions, remains stable across age-ranges. Moreover, older compared to younger individuals tend to invest more into the planning and preparatory phases of these complex tasks. The greater investment into the planning phase might further be related to increased recall of semantic knowledge and activation of the default mode network during the planning phase in older individuals.
This comparative study helps to fill an important gap in the field of apraxia research and, by incorporating age-related neural reorganization processes, allows us to link these results to studies, including lesion data from mostly older apraxia patients.
Seifert, C., Zhao, J., Brandi, M.-L., Kampe, T., Hermsdörfer, J. & Wohlschläger, A. (2023) Investigating the effects of the aging brain on real tool use performance—an fMRI study. Front. Aging Neurosci. 15:1238731. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2023.1238731