Differences in Visuospatial Cognition Performance and Regional Brain Activation Between 20s and 40s

Abstract This study investigated the effect of aging on visuospatial cognition performance and regional brain activation between 20s and 40s. Eight right-handed male college students in their twenties and six right-handed male adults in their forties who were graduated from college participated in the study. A visuospatial task was presented while brain images were acquired by a 3T functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) system. Accuracy rate of visospatial tasks was calculated. Using the subtraction procedure, activated areas in the brain during visuospatial tasks were color-coded by t-score. The double subtraction method was used to analyze the effect of the aging between the two age groups (i.e., 20s vs. 40s). Compared to the 40s the 20s showed higher visuospatial performance. The cerebellum, occipital lobe, parietal lobe, and frontal lobe were almost similarly activated for two age groups. Increased brain activations, however, were observed in some regions in the parietal and superior frontal lobes at 20s compared to 40s. There was more activation observed in some regions in the middle frontal and right inferior frontal lobes at 40s compared to 20s. These results suggest that the lowering of visuospatial performance with aging between 20s and 40s was correlated to the decrease of activation area in the parietal lobe and the change of activation area in the frontal lobe.