Age-related changes in behavioural and neural variability in a decision-making task

Age-related cognitive decline in learning and decision-making may arise from increased variability of neural responses. Here, we investigated how ageing affects behavioural and neural variability by recording >18,000 neurons across 16 brain regions (including cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, midbrain, and basal ganglia) in younger and older mice performing a visual decision-making task. Older mice showed more variable response times, reproducing a common finding in human ageing studies. Ageing globally increased firing rates and post-stimulus neural variability (quantified using the Fano factor), and decreased variability quenching-the reduction in neural variability upon stimulus presentation. Older animals showed higher overall firing rates across areas of visual and motor cortex, striatum, midbrain, and hippocampus, but lower firing rates in thalamic areas. Age-related attenuation in stimulus-induced variability quenching was most prominent in visual and motor cortex, striatum, and thalamic area. These findings show how large-scale neural recordings can help uncover regional specificity of ageing effects in single neurons, ultimately improving our understanding of the neural basis of age-related cognitive decline.

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Nature Communications
Published
2026-06-30
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-74227-1
Primary Topic
Neural dynamics and brain function
Type
article
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0.00

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article

Age-related changes in behavioural and neural variability in a decision-making task

Sanjukta Krishnagopal, Ivan Gordeliy, H Bayer, Nicholas Roy et al.
Nature Communications
Neural dynamics and brain function
article

Age-related changes in behavioural and neural variability in a decision-making task

Sanjukta Krishnagopal, Ivan Gordeliy, H Bayer, Nicholas Roy, Joana Catarino, Zachary F. Mainen, Zeinab Mohammadi, Felix Huber, Michele Fabbri, Samuel Picard, Kamron Saniee, Jean‐Paul Noel, Laura Freitas-Silva, Kush Banga, Brenna McMannon, Cyrille Rossant, Liam Paninski, Davide Crombie, Christopher Krasniak, Valeria Aguillon-Rodriguez, Matteo Carandini, Jaime Arlandis, Jai Bhagat, Alexandre Pouget, Naureen Ghani, Michael Häusser, Nathaniel J Miska, Maxwell Melin, Hailey Barrell, Leenoy Meshulam, M. Felicia Davatolhagh, Jonathan W. Pillow, Alberto Pezzotta, Julius Benson, Julia M. Huntenburg, Berk Gerçek, Gaëlle Chapuis, Brandon Benson, H J Lee, Anup Khanal, Surya Ganguli, Rylan Schaeffer, Jaweria Amjad, Masayoshi Murakami, Sebastian A. Bruijns, Christopher Langdon, Georg Raiser, Michael Schartner, Laura M. Haetzel, Peter Dayan, Fei Hu, Sophie Denève, Niccolò Bonacchi, Michael Krumin, Kai Nylund, E. Kelly Buchanan, Sonja Höfer, Debottam Kundu, Zoe C. Ashwood, Luigi Acerbi, Naoki Hiratani, Fanny Cazettes, Pranav Rai, Dan Birman, Amalia Makri-Cottington, Hernando Martinez-Vergara, Isaiah McRoberts, Farideh Oloomi, Peter Latham, Kenneth D. Harris, Mandana Ahmadi, Fenying Zang, Sabrina Perrenoud, Carolina Quadrado, Ila Fiete, Cole Hurwitz, Catalin Mitelut, Eric EJ DeWitt, Ari Liu, Mayo Faulkner, Kim Miller, Tatiana Engel, Noam Roth, Alejandro Pan Vazquez, Sonja Förster, Dora Angelaki, Thomas Mrsic-Flogel, Charles Findling, Petrina Lau, Guido T. Meijer, Yang Dan, Larry Abbott, Julien Boussard, Florian Rau, Kcenia Bougrova, Agnès Landemard, Christopher Langfield, Robert Fetcho, Inês C. Laranjeira, Robert Campbell
article en

Abstract

Age-related cognitive decline in learning and decision-making may arise from increased variability of neural responses. Here, we investigated how ageing affects behavioural and neural variability by recording >18,000 neurons across 16 brain regions (including cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, midbrain, and basal ganglia) in younger and older mice performing a visual decision-making task. Older mice showed more variable response times, reproducing a common finding in human ageing studies. Ageing globally increased firing rates and post-stimulus neural variability (quantified using the Fano factor), and decreased variability quenching-the reduction in neural variability upon stimulus presentation. Older animals showed higher overall firing rates across areas of visual and motor cortex, striatum, midbrain, and hippocampus, but lower firing rates in thalamic areas. Age-related attenuation in stimulus-induced variability quenching was most prominent in visual and motor cortex, striatum, and thalamic area. These findings show how large-scale neural recordings can help uncover regional specificity of ageing effects in single neurons, ultimately improving our understanding of the neural basis of age-related cognitive decline.

Nature Communications
Champalimaud Foundation (PT), University of Geneva (CH), Leiden University (NL), University of Minnesota (US), University of California, Los Angeles (US), Princeton University (US), University of Washington (US), University of Applied Sciences Leiden (NL), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (US), Sainsbury Laboratory (GB), Wolfson Foundation (GB), École Normale Supérieure - PSL (FR), ISPA - Instituto Universitário (PT), École Normale Supérieure (BI), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (DE), Oxford Centre for Computational Neuroscience (GB), Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (FR), University College London (GB), New York University (US), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US), University of Yamanashi (JP), Columbia University (US), University of California, Berkeley (US), Stanford University (US)
Wellcome Trust, International Brain Research Organization, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, China Scholarship Council, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina - Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften
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Neural dynamics and brain function
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