How Cortical Networks Change across the Lifespan

John Bero, Colin Humphries, Yang Li, Aviral Kumar, Heungyeol Lee et al.

(see article e0577252025)

Do the changes in sensorimotor and cognitive abilities that occur across the human lifespan correspond with functional changes in cortical networks? Bero and colleagues addressed this question by determining the structural and time-related dynamics of 2,352 people between the ages of 5 and 100 from Human Connectome Project resting state fMRI data. The authors discovered that both spatial and temporal scales decreased across the lifespan, which was associated with increases in cortical myelination. The visual cortex had the largest scales, while the limbic network had the smallest scales. Some prefrontal regions peaked during adolescence and decreased as people grew older. According to the authors, this work suggests that functional measures of cortical networks change during development and aging. These changes may be linked to sensorimotor and cognitive decline, though more work is needed.

How People Process Multiple Items versus One

Logan Cross, Ryan Webb, and John P O'Doherty

(see article e0983252025)

Cross et al. explored how the human brain processes the value of multiple options in front of them versus a single item. Over the course of 3 d, the researchers used fMRI on 14 participants as they evaluated individual or bundles of consumer items. For bundles of items, values were created subadditively, not by summing individual item values. In other words, bundles were valued at less than the sum of their parts. On the neural level, a network in the prefrontal cortex supported evaluations of bundles and the items within them, but the way value was represented was rescaled depending on whether people were looking at multiple items versus an individual item. According to the authors, this suggests that the brain does not rely on a fixed, absolute value scale but instead utilizes a flexible code that dynamically normalizes the value scale to the context of the decision.

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Neural correlates of item and bundle value. There is a significant cluster in the anterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex. See Cross et al. for more information.