NCT05574634

The Role of the Locus Coeruleus in Age-related Distractibility

Losing Specificity: the Role of the Locus Coeruleus in Age-related Distractibility

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 200 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 75 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

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.

Conditions

• Aging
• Alzheimer Disease

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Tablet based adaptive multimodal attention practice program	An 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.
BEHAVIORAL	Tablet based adaptive criterion task practice program	An 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.

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-04-11
• Primary completion: 2027-06-30
• Completion: 2027-06-30
• First posted: 2022-10-10
• Last updated: 2025-08-19

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States