Age differences in Neural Activation to Face Trustworthiness: Voxel Pattern and Activation Level Assessments.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Social Cognition
• Aging Research

Background:

• Assessing trustworthiness from faces is a critical social skill.
• Previous fMRI studies show reward region activation differences related to face trustworthiness, particularly in younger adults.
• A prior analysis of this data indicated older adults (OA) showed reward region activation to trustworthiness, unlike younger adults (YA), contradicting prior literature.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if voxel pattern analysis could detect neural responses to facial trustworthiness in younger adults (YA).
• To explore age-related differences in neural discrimination of trustworthiness using pattern classification.
• To test the hypothesis that voxel pattern analyses would be more sensitive to YA neural responses and better classify YA than OA neural responses.

Main Methods:

• Reanalysis of existing fMRI data using two pattern classification models.
• Evaluation of model performance through permutation testing.
• Focus on neural activity within brain reward regions related to judging face trustworthiness.

Main Results:

• Voxel patterns successfully discriminated trustworthiness levels in reward regions for both younger adults (YA) and older adults (OA).
• Pattern classification achieved higher accuracy for YA than for OA, reversing prior findings based on activation levels.
• This suggests voxel patterns may uniquely index stimulus information content, potentially revealing age-related representational differences.

Conclusions:

• Voxel pattern analysis is sensitive to neural discrimination of facial trustworthiness across the adult lifespan.
• The analytic method significantly moderates age differences, indicating distinct neural representation patterns between YA and OA.
• Findings support the idea that voxel patterns capture stimulus information content, which may be impaired with age.