Temporal Dynamics of Intranasal Oxytocin in the Aging Brain During Social Cue Processing
Poster No:
912
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Natalie Ebner1,2, Didem Pehlivanoglu1, Alayna Shoenfelt1, David Feifel3
Institutions:
1University of Florida, Department of Psychology, Gainesville, FL, 2McKnight Brain Institute, Cognitive Aging and Memory Center, Gainesville, FL, 3UC San Diego Medical Center, San Diego, CA
First Author:
Natalie Ebner
University of Florida, Department of Psychology|McKnight Brain Institute, Cognitive Aging and Memory Center
Gainesville, FL|Gainesville, FL
University of Florida, Department of Psychology|McKnight Brain Institute, Cognitive Aging and Memory Center
Gainesville, FL|Gainesville, FL
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
Intranasal oxytocin (OT), which circumvents the blood-brain barrier possibly via olfactory nerve pathways (Quintana et al., 2018), is a non-invasive route of exogenous OT delivery to the human brain for studying the neuropeptide's central functions (Horta et al., 2020). Emerging evidence suggests an age-related decline in peripheral OT levels (Elabd et al., 2014) combined with benefits from intranasal OT administration on social cognition in aging (Horta et al., 2020). For example, repeated administration of intranasal OT resulted in maintained functional brain network connectivity during animacy perception relative to a placebo (P) intervention among older adults (Valdes-Hernandez et al., 2021). Similarly, repeated intranasal OT vs. P administration resulted in maintained gaze fixations to social (faces) but not non-social (scenes) stimuli (Shoenfelt et al., 2024). Both these studies support the role of OT in maintenance of stimulus salience for social cues, in line with the recently proposed Tri-Phasic Model of Oxytocin (TRIO; Pehlivanoglu et al., 2020). In particular, TRIO proposes that OT acts as a filter to guide attention selectively towards social over non-social stimuli and modulates approach motivation associated with social cues. The present study, for the first time, used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine temporal dynamics of a four-week/chronic intranasal OT administration during social cue processing in the aging brain.
Methods:
The study included 77 generally healthy older adults (Mean Age = 71.7 years, SD = 6.97, Range = 56-88 years, 51% OT), who were randomly assigned to either self-administer 28 days of intranasal OT or P (24 International Units twice daily) in a randomized, double-blind, between-subject design. Before and after the intervention, participants completed four runs of a Trustworthiness Rating Task while ERPs were recorded from 32-channel active electrodes (Ag/Ag-Cl; international 10–20 system; actiCHamp, Brain Products). Each run comprised 72 face images (Ebner et al., 2010) that varied in face age (young and older) and emotion expression (happy and angry) as well as 12 scenes as non-social control stimuli. Each stimulus was viewed for 2 seconds. ERP data were re-referenced to the average of the mastoid electrodes offline and digitally bandpass filtered using a 2nd order infinite impulse response (IIR) Butterworth filter (half-amplitude cutoffs at 0.01 and 100 Hz, 12 dB/octave roll-off). All data processing was performed in MATLAB using the EEGLAB (Delorme & Makeig, 2004) and the ERPLAB (Lopez-Calderon & Luck, 2014) toolboxes.
Results:
Statistical testing comprised mixed Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs) for faces and scenes, respectively, with Condition (OT vs. P; between-subject) and Timepoint (Pre- vs. Post-Treatment; within-subject) as predictors. The Condition x Timepoint interaction was significant (F(1, 75) = 6.89, p = .01). That is, the P300 (250-325 ms time window) showed a reduced amplitude in response to faces from pre-treatment (Figure 1A) to post-treatment (Figure 1B) at parietal electrode sites in the P group (t(75) = 2.14, p = .04), while the P300 remained stable pre-treatment to post-treatment in the OT group (t(75) = 1.58, p = .12). In contrast, this effect was not observed for the non-social scene cues (F(1, 75) = 0.76, p = .39), for which the P300 amplitude remained stable both in the P and the OT group.
Conclusions:
These findings largely align with previous studies suggesting that chronic intranasal OT administration specifically maintains salience of social cues and counters possible habituation effects from repeated exposure to such cues (Shoenfelt et al., 2024; Valdes-Hernandez et al., 2021) among older adults; and are generally consistent with the TRIO model proposing sustained attention to social cues later in the processing stream (Pehlivanoglu et al., 2020).
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Neuroscience Other 2
Lifespan Development:
Aging 1
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
EEG/MEG Modeling and Analysis
Perception, Attention and Motor Behavior:
Attention: Visual
Physiology, Metabolism and Neurotransmission:
Pharmacology and Neurotransmission
Keywords:
Aging
Cognition
Electroencephaolography (EEG)
Neurotransmitter
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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4. Horta, M., Kaylor, K., Feifel, D., & Ebner, N. C. (2020). Chronic oxytocin administration as a tool for investigation and treatment: A cross-disciplinary systematic review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 108, 1-23.
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6. Pehlivanoglu, D., Myers, E., & Ebner, N. C. (2020). Tri-Phasic Model of Oxytocin (TRIO): a systematic conceptual review of oxytocin-related ERP research. Biological psychology, 154, 107917.
7. Shoenfelt, A., Pehlivanoglu, D., Lin, T., Ziaei, M., Feifel, D., & Ebner, N. C. (2024). Effects of chronic intranasal oxytocin on visual attention to faces vs. natural scenes in older adults. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 164, 107018.
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