ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2023
Poorer White Matter Microstructure Predicts Slower and More Variable Reaction Time Performance: Evidence for a Neural Noise Hypothesis in a Large Lifespan Cohort.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fifteen years on: a review of the Cam-CAN study of the cognitive neuroscience of ageing.GeroScience · 2026Review
- Association Between Intraindividual Variability in Cognitive Performance and White Matter Organisation in Chronic Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Perceptual Decision Efficiency Is Modifiable and Associated with Decreased Musculoskeletal Injury Risk Among Female College Soccer Players.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Aging modulates the impact of cognitive interference subtypes on dynamic connectivity across a distributed motor network.npj aging · 2024Article
- Protocol and preregistration for the CODEC project: measuring, modelling and mechanistically understanding the nature of cognitive variability in early childhood.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Interindividual Differences in Cognitive Variability Are Ubiquitous and Distinct From Mean Performance in a Battery of Eleven Tasks.Journal of cognition · 2024Article
- Composite reaction time and variability correlate with whole-brain white-matter characteristics.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Most prior research has focused on characterizing averages in cognition, brain characteristics, or behavior, and attempting to predict differences in these averages among individuals. However, this overwhelming focus on mean levels may leave us with an incomplete picture of what drives individual differences in behavioral phenotypes by ignoring the variability of behavior around an individual's mean. In particular, enhanced white matter (WM) structural microstructure has been hypothesized to support consistent behavioral performance by decreasing Gaussian noise in signal transfer. Conversely, lower indices of WM microstructure are associated with greater within-subject variance in the ability to deploy performance-related resources, especially in clinical populations. We tested a mechanistic account of the "neural noise" hypothesis in a large adult lifespan cohort (Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience) with over 2500 adults (ages 18-102; 1508 female; 1173 male; 2681 behavioral sessions; 708 MRI scans) using WM fractional anisotropy to predict mean levels and variability in reaction time performance on a simple behavioral task using a dynamic structural equation model. By modeling robust and reliable individual differences in within-person variability, we found support for a neural noise hypothesis (Kail, 1997), with lower fractional anisotropy predicted individual differences in separable components of behavioral performance estimated using dynamic structural equation model, including slower mean responses and increased variability. These effects remained when including age, suggesting consistent effects of WM microstructure across the adult lifespan unique from concurrent effects of aging. Crucially, we show that variability can be reliably separated from mean performance using advanced modeling tools, enabling tests of distinct hypotheses for each component of performance.
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