ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2025
Age-Related Increase in Locus Ceruleus Activity and Connectivity with the Prefrontal Cortex during Ambiguity Processing.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Molecular programs in human locus coeruleus link APOE and neuromelanin to Alzheimer's vulnerability.Acta neuropathologica · 2026Article
- Ultra-high field brain MRI for functional neurological disorder: opportunities and challenges.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2026Review
- Impact of Alzheimer's disease risk factors and local neuromelanin content on the transcriptomic landscape of the human locus coeruleus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Interpreting ambiguous environmental cues, like facial expressions, becomes increasingly challenging with age, especially as cognitive resources decline. Managing these challenges requires adaptive neural mechanisms that are essential for maintaining mental well-being. The locus ceruleus (LC), the brain's main norepinephrine source, regulates attention, arousal, and stress response. With extensive cortical connections, the LC supports adapting to cognitive demands and resolving conflicting cues from environment, particularly in later life. Previous research suggests that LC interacts with the prefrontal cortex (PFC) during high-conflict tasks. However, whether LC activity and its connectivity with the PFC support emotional ambiguity processing and contributes to emotional well-being in healthy aging remains unclear. To address this gap, we used 7T-MRI to examine LC function in 75 younger (25.8 ± 4.02 years, 35 females) and 69 older adults (71.3 ± 4.1 years, 35 females) during facial emotion recognition task morphed with varying ambiguity: unambiguous, intermediate ambiguity, and absolute ambiguity. Behaviorally, participants had longer response times and lower confidence during the absolute-ambiguity condition, while older adults perceived ambiguous faces as happy more frequently than younger adults. Neuroimaging results revealed older adults exhibited greater LC activity and enhanced connectivity with dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) during absolute ambiguity compared with younger adults. This heightened connectivity in older adults was linked to better task-independent self-reported mental well-being questionnaires and greater emotional resilience scores derived from principal component analysis. Overall, these findings suggest that greater LC activity supports managing cognitively demanding tasks, while enhanced LC-dlPFC connectivity promotes emotional well-being, highlighting this neural pathway's role in healthy aging.
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Registered trials
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