Brain Anatomy in Old Age

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Longitudinal Healthy Aging Brain (LHAB) database project

The LHAB Database Project is a prospective longitudinal study, which has the primary goal of describing the development of brain structure / brain function and behavior in a sample of healthy elderly individuals (65+). The project specifically focuses on domain-overlapping links between brain and psychometric measures to evaluate for example if changes in one domain are associated with concurrent or lagged changes in the other domain. Beyond this, additional individual information (e.g. biographical information, activities, well-being) is collected to explain interindividual variability in the observed developmental trajectories. Another important aspect is the establishment of a data management portal that fosters current and future research as well as re- and meta-analyses of these valuable longitudinal multi-domain data.

Project status: ongoing (begin of data acquisition in 2011), several sub-projects
Contact: Dr. Susan Mérillat

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Object-Location Memory Training (OLM): Cortical thickness and cognitive ability in healthy aging (LHAB – 1000BRAINS collaboration)

The OLM project is a previously completed cognitive training study in which healthy elderly adults underwent either process-based training of the ability to learn and remember object-location associations or an active control condition. Initial behavioral results indicate that training led to improvements in the object-location memory tasks as well as in the domains of spatial episodic memory (near-transfer) and reasoning (far-transfer). Current analyses incorporate structural and functional neuroimaging data in order to elucidate individual predictors of training-related cognitive improvements, identify brain regions affected by OLM training, and examine temporal trajectories of brain activity across the training period.

Project status: ongoing (since 2014)
Contact: Dr. Susan Mérillat