Neuroanatomical changes are considered to cause cognitive decline during the process of aging. We analyzed age-related differences in tasks that evoked alterations in EEG inter-regional synchronization in a healthy aging network topology. We conducted a cross-sectional comparison of middle-aged and elderly subjects, and multichannel EEG was analyzed in a resting state and during a visual WM task. Compared to the resting state, the visual WM task showed more significant differences in terms of network measures. Local efficiency, global efficiency, clustering coefficient, characteristic path length, node strength, and assortativity were found to be found lower in elderly subjects. Age-related differences were reported during audiovisual processing using network topology parameters in a study in young vs. older adults [67]. In an n-back WM task, significant alterations were observed in older adults in network topology parameters such as clustering coefficient and path length, which supports our findings from the visual WM task [43]. Furthermore, we also found reduced assortativity in elderly compared to middle-aged subjects, and there was less resiliency among elderly networks compared to middle-aged networks.
