Abstract
The global population is ageing at an unprecedented rate. Understanding how ageing affects the brain is therefore crucial to inform strategies that support cognitive health and independence in older adults. Remarkably, not all adults age in the same way, some maintain their cognitive performance and appear more resilient to the effects of ageing, while others exhibit much more pronounced cognitive decline. In this project, we investigate how the brain maintains language comprehension until a very old age, by focusing on predictive coding mechanisms at the individual level. We investigate the neural dynamics of language comprehension across the adult lifespan by: 1) identifying data-driven brain processing states in EEG during sentence reading based on lexical and individual characteristics, 2) developing a tuned Large Language Model to generate sentences that maximally challenge the language network and 3) validating these sentences through an in vivo and novel in silico EEG-encoding approach. This project allows us to test the hypothesis that high-functioning older adults exhibit brain states associated with predictive coding, resembling those of younger individuals. This proposal will further our knowledge on healthy neurocognitive ageing, while also advancing methodological approaches for future neurophysiological research.
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