WEDNESDAY, March 1, 2006 (HealthDay News) -- When it comes to how the brain processes visual information, age matters, a new study suggests.
Duke University researchers used brain imaging technologies to study the brains of two groups of volunteers -- aged 19 to 28 and 60 to 82 -- while they performed vision-related tasks.
Younger people tended to use "bottom-up" areas of the brain involved in processing the visual features of a scene, the researchers report in the March 1 online edition of the Neurobiology of Aging. This area is the occipital region, located in lower back of the brain.
In contrast, older adults made more use of "top-down" areas located in the front and upper back areas of the brain. These "parietal" areas control higher functions such as speech, thought and planning for the future.
For their study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the volunteers' gray brain matter and another technology, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), to study their white matter. Gray matter is responsible for information processing and white matter enables transmission of information between different areas of the brain.
The study found that white matter appeared to play a role in which areas of the brain are activated during vision tasks. It also found that age-related decline in white matter was more pronounced in frontal areas of the brain.
"It appears that age-related cognitive changes are the result of combined influences on the gray matter and the white matter," study author David Madden, a behavioral psychologist and researcher on aging, said in a prepared statement.
"We need further studies to better understand how all these different factors relate to each other, and which changes in cognition result from normal aging or something else," he said.
More information
The American Academy of Family Physicians has more about aging and the brain.
