Education differentiates cognitive performance and resting state fMRI connectivity in healthy aging

Objectives: In healthy aging, the way people cope differently with cognitive and neural decline is influenced by exposure to cognitively enriching life-experiences. Education is one of them, so that in general, the higher the education, the better the expected cognitive performance in aging. At the neural level, it is not clear yet how education can differentiate resting state functional connectivity profiles and their cognitive underpinnings. Thus, with this study, we aimed to investigate whether the variable education allowed for a finer description of age-related differences in cognition and resting state FC.

Methods: We analyzed in 197 healthy individuals (137 young adults aged 20–35 and 60 older adults aged 55–80 from the publicly available LEMON database), a pool of cognitive and neural variables, derived from magnetic resonance imaging, in relation to education. Firstly, we assessed age-related differences, by comparing young and older adults. Then, we investigated the possible role of education in outlining such differences, by splitting the group of older adults based on their education.

Results: In terms of cognitive performance, older adults with higher education and young adults were comparable in language and executive functions. Interestingly, they had a wider vocabulary compared to young adults and older adults with lower education. Concerning functional connectivity, the results showed significant age- and education-related differences within three networks: the Visual-Medial, the Dorsal Attentional, and the Default Mode network (DMN). For the DMN, we also found a relationship with memory performance, which strengthen the evidence that this network has a specific role in linking cognitive maintenance and FC at rest in healthy aging.

Discussion: Our study revealed that education contributes to differentiating cognitive and neural profiles in healthy older adults. Also, the DMN could be a key network in this context, as it may reflect some compensatory mechanisms relative to memory capacities in older adults with higher education.