Age-related neural dynamics revealed by time-domain fNIRS decoding of audiovisual dual-task processing.

Healthy aging is accompanied by widespread changes in cortical structure and function, particularly within networks supporting multisensory integration and cognitive control. However, it remains unclear whether age-related neural alterations can be reliably decoded from individual brain activity patterns, especially under different cognitive states. This study examined whether age-related neural alterations can be decoded from time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals during resting and complex audiovisual processing. fNIRS data were collected from cognitively normal younger and older adults across temporal, frontal, and parietal cortices. Nine time-domain features of oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) were extracted and analyzed using supervised machine learning (SVM). Decoding accuracy was low at rest (peak = 0.651 with kurtosis alone) and remained poor across different classifiers. In contrast, during the audiovisual dual-task, a combination of five features-variance, peak, time-to-peak, slope, and skewness-achieved high classification accuracy (0.810), revealing robust age-related neural signatures. Spatial analysis showed that discriminative optodes were bilaterally distributed but functionally asymmetric: left temporoparietal regions were primarily involved in auditory processing and multisensory integration, whereas right frontoparietal regions supported attentional control and top-down regulation. These findings demonstrate that age-related neural dynamics are best captured under high cognitive load, highlighting time-domain fNIRS features as sensitive markers of cortical reorganization and potential indicators of healthy brain aging.
Mental Health
Policy

Authors

Liu Liu, Ding Ding, Lu Lu, Wang Wang, Wang Wang, Kou Kou, Wang Wang
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