Grant: Regional Partnership Program New Investigator Award

The western population is rapidly aging. Recent estimates suggest that in less than five years the proportion of individuals over the age of 65 will increase by 30%. As one ages many cognitive abilities, including the processing of spatial information, decline. Research has shown that aging may differentially affect how the two hemispheres of the brain are recruited to complete specific tasks. In particular, research suggests that with age, tasks that in younger individuals predominately engage only one hemisphere, show bilateral activation. A rich body of knowledge in this area has accrued over the recent years. However, much of this research has utilized fMRI or tachistoscope techniques requiring a stationary participant and typically brief stimulus presentations. Being able to examine the effects of aging on functional lateralization using more naturalistic tasks would greatly contribute to our understanding of the underlying mechanisms and behavioral consequences of hemispheric asymmetry and the affect that aging has on hemispheric lateralization. The development of an avian model allows for this possibility. Birds present a unique opportunity to study lateralization of function due to the anatomical arrangements that channel information from one eye directly into the opposite brain hemisphere - a "natural split-brain" situation. Thus, the function of each hemisphere may be studied repeatedly within the same animal simply by blocking one eye with a patch. This situation is not available in current mammalian models. Therefore, the overall objective of the proposed research is to use the pigeon to investigate how aging affects how the two hemispheres of our brain differentially process spatial information, and how aging influences the processing of this information.