Approved Research

Cross-sectional vs. Longitudinal Aging

Lay summary

Aging is an important field of study within cognitive neuroscience, and this research into understanding how aspects of brain structure and function change with age is crucial to better understand the process of healthy aging, and to track how individuals fare in this process. However, much aging research is done cross-sectionally, taking measurements from only one timepoint into consideration, or by investigating group differences between a group of younger and a group of older adults.

As many others have done in the past, we argue that studying aging in this single snapshot manner does not accurately depict aging-related neural changes, especially in comparison to longitudinal studies which are able to accurately track within-person effects, thereby better capturing the nature of the change of brain and cognition as a person ages. With this work, we aim to take this a crucial step further by showing that a) longitudinal studies are more effective than cross-sectional studies at capturing "true" age-related changes, and b) how and why this relationship is necessarily constrained by the way in which measures of change are calculated. The project will take likely take 36 months.