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Facilitating communication between generations has become increasingly important. However, individuals often demonstrate a preference for their own age group, which can impact social interactions, and such bias in young adults even extends to inhibitory control. To assess whether older adults also experience this phenomenon, a group of younger and older adults completed a Go/NoGo task incorporating young and old faces, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Within the networks subserving successful and unsuccessful response inhibition, patterns of activity demonstrated distinct neural age bias effects in each age group. During successful inhibition, the older adult group demonstrated significantly increased activity to other-age faces, whereas unsuccessful inhibition in the younger group produced significantly enhanced activity to other-age faces. Consequently, the findings of the study confirm that neural responses to successful and unsuccessful inhibition can be contingent on the stimulus-specific attribute of age in both younger and older adults. These findings have important implications in regard to minimizing the emergence of negative consequences, such as ageism, as a result of related implicit biases., (Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Normal adult aging is associated with difficulties in processing social cues to emotions such as anger and also altered motivation to focus more on positive than negative information. Gaze direction is an important modifier of the social signals conveyed by an emotion, for example, an angry face looking directly at you is considerably more threatening than an angry face looking away. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that older adults would show less neural differentiation to angry faces with direct and avert gaze compared to younger people, with the opposite prediction for happy faces. Healthy older (65-75 years; mean = 69.75) and younger (17-27 years; mean = 20.65) adults completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment in which they were asked to identify happy and angry expressions displayed either with direct or averted gaze. While younger adults showed neural sensitivity to eye-gaze direction during recognition of angry expressions, older adults showed no effect of eye-gaze direction on neural response. In contrast, older adults showed sensitivity to eye-gaze direction during recognition of happy expressions but younger adults did not. Additionally, brain-behavior correlations were conducted to investigate the relationships between emotion recognition and mentalizing brain network in both age groups. Younger (but not older) adults' social cognitive performance was differentially correlated with activation in 2 brain networks when looking at angry faces with direct compared to averted gaze. These novel findings provide evidence for age-related differences in the neural substrates underlying the capacity to integrate facial affect and eye-gaze cues. The results of this study suggest that age-related differences in integrating facial cues may be related to engagement of the mentalizing network, with potentially important implications for social cognitive functioning in late adulthood., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The relations among structural integrity, functional connectivity (FC), and cognitive performance in the aging brain are still understudied. Here, we used multimodal and multivariate approaches to specifically examine age-related changes in task-related FC, gray-matter volumetrics, white-matter integrity, and performance. Our results are two-fold, showing (i) age-related differences in FC of the working memory network and (ii) age-related recruitment of a compensatory network associated with better accuracy on the task. Increased connectivity in the compensatory network correlates positively with preserved white-matter integrity in bilateral frontoparietal tracks and with larger gray-matter volume of right inferior parietal lobule. These findings demonstrate the importance of structural integrity and FC in working memory performance associated with healthy aging., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Recent evidence has shown that older adults fail to show adaptation in the right fusiform gyrus (FG) to the same face presented repeatedly, despite accurate detection of the previously presented face. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate whether this phenomenon is associated with age-related reductions in face specificity in brain activity and whether older adults compensate for these face-processing deficiencies by increasing activity in other areas within the face-processing network, or outside this network. A comparison of brain activity across multiple stimulus categories showed that, unlike young adults who engaged a number of brain regions specific to face processing, older adults generalized these patterns of activity to objects and houses. Also, young adults showed functional connectivity between the right FG and its homologous region during face processing, whereas older adults did not engage the left FG but showed a functional connection between the right FG and left orbitofrontal cortex. Finally, this frontotemporal functional connection was activated more strongly in older adults who performed better on a face-matching task (done outside of the scanner), suggesting increased involvement of this functional link for successful face recognition with increasing age. These findings suggest that 2 neural mechanisms, dedifferentiation and compensatory neural recruitment, underlie age differences in face processing., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)