The Role of the Locus Coeruleus in Age-related Distractibility
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseNot applicable
Trial typeInterventional
Biological sexAll
Age18-75
SponsorVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
About this trial
A growing body of research has highlighted the importance of frontal regions, at both the functional and structural levels, in age-related declines in attentional and cognitive processing. However, the underlying neurobiological pathophysiological changes in the brain that contribute to these declines are still largely unclear. The objective of this proposal is to investigate neural mechanisms of age-related attentional distractibility, focusing on the neural circuit initiated from the locus coeruleus (LC). In the current proposal, the investigators will test the hypothesis that the neural disconnectivity of LC with the salience network (SN) drives failures of ignoring distractors in older adults. The investigators will examine how LC-SN connectivity is associated with selective attention performance, and how improved LC-SN connectivity through a cognitive training program may lead to improved attentional performance.
Eligibility criteria
This trial accepts healthy volunteersQualifiers
Healthy adult participants
No younger than 18 and no older than 75 yrs of age
Ability to provide written informed consent
History of surgery involving metal implants
Disqualifiers
None
Trial design
Design model
Parallel
Treatments tested in this trial
Tablet based adaptive multimodal attention practice program
BehavioralAn adaptive at-home tablet-based program that includes variants of the Flanker Task, the Stroop Task, and a Visual Tracking Task. Each session of practice will include up to ten minutes with each of these task types, and the tasks will increase in difficulty in a way that further taxes attention (such as through more distractors or more incongruent trials) as participant performance improves.
Tablet based adaptive criterion task practice program
BehavioralAn adaptive, at-home tablet-based variant of the criterion task, that is, the selective attention/distraction task used during the scanning portion of the human participant portions of the study, that takes up to 25 minutes to complete each session.
Treatment groups
200 Participants
are divided into 2 treatment groupsGroup A: Older adult participantsExperimental treatment 2 interventions
Group B: Younger adult participantsNo intervention 0 interventions
Trial outcomes
Primary outcomes
1
Change in accuracy on the place-face selective attention task after two weeks
During this task, participants will be presented to with target place stimuli overlaid on nonexpressive faces) and be asked to identify categories of place images ('building' to 'house') selectively as soon as possible while ignoring overlapped faces. The investigators will also include place only images to measure participants' baseline neural activation when there is no distractor. Each image condition will be presented in a mixed event related design that includes 15 blocks for each condition as a function of image type (overlaid vs. place-only). The block order will be counterbalanced and each block will be separated by a 10-s blank screen.
Time frame
Scan before and after attentional practice (2 weeks between scans)2
Change in fMRI LC-SN connectivity after two weeks
An fMRI measure of LC-SN connectivity
Time frame
Scan before and after attentional practice (2 weeks between scans)Sponsors and contacts
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Source ClinicalTrials.gov