Human brain processing declines with aging and reveals cognitive and perceptual impairments. However, it remains unclear how the course of aging affects brain plasticity. Is an aging brain still plastic? If so, can older people recover age-associated impaired functions through plasticity?
The researches of visual perceptual learning (VPL) may answer such questions. VPL refers to long-term improvement on a visual task and is regarded as a manifestation of brain plasticity. Several studies have demonstrated that repetitive and intensive practice leads to enhance impaired visual functions in younger adults, and the learning is associated with the functional activation changes in the early visual area. In my presentation, I will focus on whether VPL can be acquired by older adults in order to enhance impaired visual ability. If it can, what is the underlying neuronal mechanism of VPL in aging?
Our research findings demonstrated that—after extensive visual training—VPL might be able to enhance older adults’ performance to levels similar to when they were young. More importantly, in the aging brain, VPL is associated with structural changes in the early visual area. The advanced morphological analysis indicated that the cortical map size of the aging brain is associated with the magnitude of learning. These findings may provide more evidence of plasticity in the visual system in older adults and further suggest that visual plasticity has different underlying neural mechanisms between older and younger adults.