ArticlePsychological bulletin2011
Only time will tell: cross-sectional studies offer no solution to the age-brain-cognition triangle: comment on Salthouse (2011).
Article in Psychological bulletin, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 106 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
106 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 199 citations in OpenAlex.
- A critical systematic review of the impact of sedentarism and physical inactivity on the cognitive performance of children.Systematic reviews · 2026Pooled it
- Prefrontal cortex and executive functions in healthy adults: a meta-analysis of structural neuroimaging studies.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2014Pooled it
- Right-left asymmetry in corticospinal tract microstructure and dexterity are uncoupled in late adulthood.NeuroImage · 2021Trial
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- High-resolution MRI evidence for age- and sex-related changes in hippocampal subfield volume during healthy aging.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Seven-year progression of white matter hyperintensities and age-related cognitive change in healthy middle-aged and older adults.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Dissociable contributions of cortical thickness and surface area to cognitive ageing: evidence from multiple longitudinal cohorts.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Fifteen years on: a review of the Cam-CAN study of the cognitive neuroscience of ageing.GeroScience · 2026Review
- Trajectories of pain and cognitive function: 22 years of evidence in mid-to-later life.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Cognitive dedifferentiation in later life: longitudinal findings from the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2026Article
- Vulnerability to memory decline in aging revealed by a mega-analysis of structural brain change.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Challenges and opportunities of psychological aging research.European journal of ageing · 2025Review
- Longitudinal non-linear changes in the microstructure of the hippocampal subfields in older adults.Neurobiology of aging · 2025Article
- 10-year longitudinal dopamine D2-receptor losses are associated with cognitive decline in healthy aging.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Complementary MR measures of white matter and their relation to cardiovascular health and cognition.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Developmental Changes in Brain Cellular Membrane and Energy Metabolism: A Multi-occasionThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Reliability of structural brain change in cognitively healthy adult samples.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Aging-related losses in dopamine D2/3 receptor availability are linked to working-memory decline across five years.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Lifespan longitudinal changes in mesocortical thickness and executive function: Role of dopaminergic genetic predisposition.Neurobiology of aging · 2025Article
46 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
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Abstract
Salthouse (2011) critically reviewed cross-sectional and longitudinal relations among adult age, brain structure, and cognition (ABC) and identified problems in interpretation of the extant literature. His review, however, missed several important points. First, there is enough disparity among the measures of brain structure and cognitive performance to question the uniformity of B and C vertices of the ABC triangle. Second, age differences and age changes in brain and cognition are often nonlinear. Third, variances and correlations among measures of brain and cognition frequently vary with age. Fourth, cross-sectional comparisons among competing models of ABC associations cannot disambiguate competing hypotheses about the structure and the range of directed and reciprocal relations between changes in brain and behavior. We offer the following conclusions, based on these observations. First, individual differences among younger adults are not useful for understanding the aging of brain and behavior. Second, only multivariate longitudinal studies, age-comparative experimental interventions, and a combination of the two will deliver us from the predicaments of the ABC triangle described by Salthouse. Mediation models of cross-sectional data represent age-related differences in target variables but fail to approximate time-dependent relations; thus, they do not elucidate the dimensions and dynamics of cognitive aging.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.