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

Financial decision making (FDM) and awareness of one's own financial decision making abilities are both clinically and practically important constructs in older adults. Structural and functional neuroimaging may be useful to shed light on the neural mechanisms supporting these constructs and further help identify those at risk for making poor decisions and losing money. We used resting state (rs)-functional connectivity in the present study. We hypothesized that Frontoparietal-Salience (FP-SAL) between-network connectivity would be most strongly associated with FDM, while Default Mode Network-Salience (DMN-SAL) between-network connectivity would be more associated with financial awareness. Community-dwelling older adults (59% women, 67% White, 29% Black) were recruited with mean age=68.43 years (SD=5.14) and mean education=15.88 (SD=2.41). Primary outcomes included standardized measures of financial decision making, financial awareness metrics derived from metacognitive frameworks, and between-network connectivity values. After adjusting for demographic factors and individual within-network connectivity values, FDM was only associated with FP-SAL network connectivity. In contrast to the predictions of our hypothesis, higher between-network connectivity values were associated with lower FDM scores. No significant associations between DMN-SAL between network connectivity and financial awareness was found. Our preliminary findings suggest that the association between FP-SAL between network connectivity and FDM is not straightforward. Future studies using larger samples with alternate analytic approaches will be required to replicate these findings.