Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disease that leads to deficits in memory and executive function. AD prevalence is climbing at alarming rates in Canada. Families, communities, and health care systems are strained economically and emotionally from the resources that are being devoted to AD care. Treatment for AD is lagging because of the poorly understood neural and cognitive mechanisms that underly the symptoms. Exploration-exploitation is an emergent model that may help uncover these mechanisms and thus help facilitate future clinical assessment and treatment research. Exploration-exploitation posits that as people age, they tend to trade novelty seeking problem solving (i.e., exploration) for a reliance on prior knowledge (i.e., exploitation). This cognitive shift, in theory, maps onto the brain changes that are known to occur during healthy and even pathological aging. However, this cognitive-neural mapping has never been explicitly studied. The current study will develop a decision-making/ problem solving paradigm to be implemented during a brain scan procedure. The procedure will be delivered to people of different ages, including older adults from the Montreal Cohort who are at a high risk for AD. If a stronger reliance on exploitative behaviour is seen among those at-risk for AD, then this could signal the presence of a novel behavioural biomarker that can predict a forecasting AD diagnosis. It is essential to uncover not only the cognitive and neuromechanisms of healthy aging, but also pathological aging in order to facilitate the clinical assessment of at-risk geriatric populations, which could potentially outline new early preventative interventions.