Age-related reduction of adaptive brain response during semantic integration is associated with gray matter reduction

Abstract

While aging is associated with increased knowledge, it is also associated with decreased semantic integration. To investigate brain activation changes during semantic integration, a sample of forty-eight 25-75 year-old adults read sentences with high cloze (HC) and low cloze (LC) probability while functional magnetic resonance imaging was conducted. Significant age-related reduction of cloze effect (LC vs. HC) was found in several regions, especially the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which play an important role in semantic integration. Moreover, when accounting for global gray matter volume reduction, the age-cloze correlation in the left MFG and right IFG was absent. The results suggest that brain structural atrophy may disrupt brain response in aging brains, which then show less brain engagement in semantic integration.