Jenna Merenstein

Aging is associated with some degree of cognitive decline, even in healthy older adults without dementia. But our cognitive abilities are not equally affected across the lifespan. Some abilities, like world knowledge, hold steady, or even increase as we age. Other abilities based on processing speed, like attention and memory, show more substantial decline. I focus on these “fluid” cognitive abilities as they are the chief complaint among healthy older adults. I specifically seek to understand how age-related decline in fluid cognition can be attributed to differences in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures of brain structure and function. My work is motivated by the cortical disconnection model, which proposes that degradation of the white matter pathways that connect distributed gray matter regions contributes to age-related cognitive dysfunction.