Aperiodic EEG activity is a domain-specific marker of attentional aging in neurotypical adults

Abstract

Aperiodic neural activity has been reliably shown to be reduced among older adults, and these reductions are associated with age-related cognitive decline. These results suggest that aperiodic activity, as measured by the spectral exponent, might be a viable electrophysiological biomarker for cognitive aging. However, this has not been tested longitudinally, within participants, during normal aging. Here, we used a longitudinal cohort to test whether changes in aperiodic activity between two sessions, approximately 5 years apart, track behavioral change across two domains: sustained attention (Psychomotor Vigilance Test) and executive function (modified Simon task). We found that aperiodic activity declined within individuals after the interval, independent of age at baseline. This within-person change tracked concurrent changes in reaction times during visual attention but was not associated with changes in any Simon task measure. Within a resampling framework, the aperiodic-PVT association was stable across cohort resamples and independently fitted partitions, though it was not confirmed in a small, frozen held-out set. These findings suggest the longitudinal decline in aperiodic activity specifically tracks sustained-attention processing speed rather than general cognitive aging, supporting its potential as a domain-specific biomarker of attentional aging in neurotypical populations.