Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To examine neural mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility changes with ageing, we synthesized findings from 87 fMRI studies, comprising 120 experiments with 2308 adult participants distributed across young, middle-age, and older groups. Our meta-analysis was focused on rule-retrieval and rule-discovery processes, assessed with Task-Switching Paradigm and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, respectively. Activation Likelihood Estimation analyses revealed age-related decreases in brain activation related to general switching ability, particularly in posterior regions, alongside an anterior shift in older adults, consistent with the Posterior-Anterior Shift in Aging (PASA) model. Rule-retrieval tasks consistently engaged left-lateralized frontoparietal regions across all age groups, with middle-age adults additionally recruiting the right cerebellum and medial-frontal gyrus. For rule-discovery tasks, age-related decline was observed in bilateral frontoparietal regions, while older adults also showed unique activation in the left inferior-frontal gyrus. These findings highlight differential ageing trajectories for rule retrieval and rule discovery, potentially reflecting compensatory neural mechanisms and dedifferentiation processes.