Cabral, JoanaVidaurre, DiegoMarques, PauloMagalhães, RicardoMoreira, Pedro SilvaSoares, José MiguelDeco, GustavoSousa, NunoKringelbach, Morten L.2019-06-172019-06-172017Cabral J, Vidaurre D, Marques P, Magalhães R, Moreira PS, Soares JM, Deco G, Sousa N, Kringelbach ML. Cognitive performance in healthy older adults relates to spontaneous switching between states of functional connectivity during rest. Sci Rep. 2017;7:5135. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-05425-72045-2322http://hdl.handle.net/10230/41772Growing evidence has shown that brain activity at rest slowly wanders through a repertoire of different states, where whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) temporarily settles into distinct FC patterns. Nevertheless, the functional role of resting-state activity remains unclear. Here, we investigate how the switching behavior of resting-state FC relates with cognitive performance in healthy older adults. We analyse resting-state fMRI data from 98 healthy adults previously categorized as being among the best or among the worst performers in a cohort study of >1000 subjects aged 50+ who underwent neuropsychological assessment. We use a novel approach focusing on the dominant FC pattern captured by the leading eigenvector of dynamic FC matrices. Recurrent FC patterns – or states – are detected and characterized in terms of lifetime, probability of occurrence and switching profiles. We find that poorer cognitive performance is associated with weaker FC temporal similarity together with altered switching between FC states. These results provide new evidence linking the switching dynamics of FC during rest with cognitive performance in later life, reinforcing the functional role of resting-state activity for effective cognitive processing.application/pdfeng© Springer Nature Publishing AG https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-05425-7 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-05425-7info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess