Objective: Recent neuroimaging studies have shown that elderly adults exhibit increased and decreased activation on various cognitive tasks, yet little is known about age-related changes in inductive reasoning.
Methods: To investigate the neural basis for the aging effect on inductive reasoning, 15 young and 15 elderly subjects performed numerical inductive reasoning while in a magnetic resonance (MR) scanner.
Results: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis revealed that numerical inductive reasoning, relative to rest, yielded multiple frontal, temporal, parietal, and some subcortical area activations for both age groups. In addition, the younger participants showed significant regions of task-induced deactivation, while no deactivation occurred in the elderly adults. Direct group comparisons showed that elderly adults exhibited greater activity in regions of task-related activation and areas showing task-induced deactivation (TID) in the younger group.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest an age-related deficiency in neural function and resource allocation during inductive reasoning.
Keywords: Aging; fMRI; numerical inductive reasoning.