# Aging effects on the neural coding of proactive and reactive cognitive control

> **NIH NIH R21** · WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY · 2022 · $244,910

## Abstract

Project Summary (Abstract)
This proposal explores the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie the well-established declines in
cognitive control function experienced even by healthy older adults. A clear consensus in the cognitive
neuroscience of aging is that age-related cognitive control declines reflect neurobiological changes that occur
in the functioning of the mid-brain dopamine system, interacting with targets located in the lateral prefrontal
cortex (lPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Although a large neuroimaging literature has investigated
such neurobiological changes, it has been limited in the ability to relate these to the key control mechanisms
postulated by neurocomputational models, which are often framed in representational terms. The current
proposal adopts an innovative experimental approach to this issue, by leveraging the methodology of
representational similarity analysis (RSA), to examine the neural coding of cognitive control and how it
changes with advancing age. Specifically, we utilize RSA to test the Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC)
theoretical framework, which postulate two distinct modes – proactive and reactive – by which cognitive control
can be deployed. A primary claim of the DMC framework is that older adults exhibit clear impairments in the
engagement of proactive control, but relative preservation of reactive control. The project directly tests this
hypothesis, employing novel theoretically-optimized variants of the work-horse color-word Stroop paradigm,
to experimentally doubly dissociate proactive and reactive control. The Stroop task is combined with RSA to
examine the neural mechanisms associated with proactive and reactive control, comparing younger and older
adults through an innovative multi-modal neuroimaging approach. Specifically, we conduct convergent and
matched fMRI and EEG studies, with RSA used to bridge between the two modalities. This multi-modal
approach enables a systematic and comprehensive test of the DMC framework, as it applies to cognitive aging,
by capitalizing on the complementary strength of each method to provide both high spatial and temporal
resolution. We exploit these strengths to test whether proactive and reactive control have distinct temporal
dynamic signatures, and involve anatomically dissociable neural mechanisms within the lPFC and ACC. Finally,
we exploit cutting-edge RSA methods to identify single-trial brain-behavior relationships, providing the
strongest tests possible regarding the explanatory power of the DMC framework for understanding the nature of
age-related cognitive control decline. As such, the findings of this project will have high

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10462368
- **Project number:** 1R21AG075590-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** TODD S BRAVER
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $244,910
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-09-30 → 2024-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10462368

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10462368, Aging effects on the neural coding of proactive and reactive cognitive control (1R21AG075590-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10462368. Licensed CC0.

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