Uncovering narrative aging: an underlying neural mechanism compensated through spatial constructional ability

"The narrative" is a complex cognitive process that has sparked a debate on whether its features age through maintenance or decline. To address this question, we attempted to uncover the narrative aging and its underlying neural characteristics with a cross-validation based cognitive neuro-decoding statistical framework. This framework used a total of 740 healthy older participants with completed narrative and extensive neuropsychological tests and MRI scans. The results indicated that narrative comprises macro and micro structures, with the macrostructure involving complex cognitive processes more relevant to aging. For the brain functional basis, brain hub nodes contributing to macrostructure were predominantly found in the angular gyrus and medial frontal lobe, while microstructure hub nodes were located in the supramarginal gyrus and middle cingulate cortex. Moreover, networks enriched by macrostructure included the default mode network and fronto-parietal network, indicating a higher functional gradient compared to the microstructure-enriched dorsal attention network. Additionally, an interesting finding showed that macrostructure increases in spatial contribution with age, suggesting a compensatory interaction where brain regions related to spatial-constructional ability have a greater impact on macrostructure. These results, supported by neural-level validation and multimodal structural MRI, provide detailed insights into the compensatory effect in the narrative aging process.