Financial Decision Making in Older Adults Is Associated With Frontoparietal-Salience Between-Network Connectivity

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Gerontology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Financial decision-making (FDM) and self-awareness of financial abilities are crucial for older adults.
• Neuroimaging can reveal neural mechanisms underlying FDM and identify individuals at risk for poor financial choices.
• Resting-state functional connectivity (rs-fMRI) is a key neuroimaging technique for studying brain networks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the association between specific brain network connectivities and financial decision making (FDM) and financial awareness in older adults.
• To test the hypothesis that Frontoparietal-Salience (FP-SAL) connectivity relates to FDM, and Default Mode Network-Salience (DMN-SAL) connectivity relates to financial awareness.

Main Methods:

• Utilized resting-state functional connectivity (rs-fMRI) in a cohort of community-dwelling older adults (mean age 68.43 years).
• Assessed standardized measures of financial decision making and financial awareness.
• Analyzed between-network connectivity, specifically FP-SAL and DMN-SAL, adjusting for demographic factors and within-network connectivity.

Main Results:

• Financial decision making (FDM) was significantly associated with FP-SAL between-network connectivity.
• Contrary to the hypothesis, higher FP-SAL connectivity was linked to lower FDM scores in older adults.
• No significant association was found between DMN-SAL connectivity and financial awareness.

Conclusions:

• The relationship between FP-SAL network connectivity and financial decision making in older adults is complex and not as hypothesized.
• Preliminary findings suggest an inverse relationship between FP-SAL connectivity and FDM performance.
• Further research with larger samples and diverse analytical methods is needed to confirm these results.