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Working memory and reasoning benefit from different modes of large-scale brain dynamics in healthy older adults

View ORCID ProfileAlexander V. Lebedev, Jonna Nilsson, View ORCID ProfileMartin Lövdén
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/202630
Alexander V. Lebedev
Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University, Gävlegatan 16, 113 30 Stockholm, Sweden
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Jonna Nilsson
Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University, Gävlegatan 16, 113 30 Stockholm, Sweden
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Martin Lövdén
Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University, Gävlegatan 16, 113 30 Stockholm, Sweden
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Abstract

Researchers have proposed that solving complex reasoning problems, a key indicator of fluid intelligence, involves the same cognitive processes as solving working memory tasks. This proposal is supported by an overlap of the functional brain activations associated with the two types of tasks and by high correlations between inter-individual differences in performance. We replicated these findings in fifty-three older subjects but also showed that solving reasoning and working memory problems benefits from different configurations of the functional connectome and that this dissimilarity increases with higher difficulty load. Specifically, superior performance in a typical working memory paradigm (n-back) was associated with up-regulation of modularity (increased between-network segregation), whereas performance in the reasoning task was associated with effective down-regulation of modularity. We also showed that working memory training promotes task-invariant increases in modularity. Since superior reasoning performance is associated with down-regulation of modular dynamics, training may thus have fostered an inefficient way of solving the reasoning tasks. This could help explain why working memory training does little to promote complex reasoning performance. The study concludes that complex reasoning abilities cannot be reduced to working memory and suggests the need to reconsider the feasibility of using working memory training interventions to attempt to achieve effects that transfer to broader cognition.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted February 12, 2018.
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Working memory and reasoning benefit from different modes of large-scale brain dynamics in healthy older adults
Alexander V. Lebedev, Jonna Nilsson, Martin Lövdén
bioRxiv 202630; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/202630
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Working memory and reasoning benefit from different modes of large-scale brain dynamics in healthy older adults
Alexander V. Lebedev, Jonna Nilsson, Martin Lövdén
bioRxiv 202630; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/202630

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