Age-related changes in behavioral and neural variability in a decision-making task

Age-related cognitive decline in learning and decision-making may arise from increased variability of neural responses. Here, we investigated how ageing affects behavioral and neural variability by recording >18,000 neurons across 16 brain regions (including cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, midbrain, and basal ganglia) in younger and older mice performing a visual decision-making task. Older mice showed more variable response times, reproducing a common finding in human ageing studies. Ageing globally increased firing rates, post-stimulus neural variability (quantified using the Fano Factor), and decreased ‘variability quenching’—the reduction in neural variability upon stimulus presentation. Older animals showed higher overall firing rates across areas of visual and motor cortex, striatum, midbrain, and hippocampus, but lower firing rates in thalamic areas. Age-related attenuation in stimulus-induced variability quenching was most prominent in visual and motor cortex, striatum, and thalamic area. These findings show how large-scale neural recordings can help uncover regional specificity of ageing effects in single neurons, improving our understanding of the neural basis of age-related cognitive decline.