Project 460066

Where we live affects cognitive decline. Neighbourhood deprivation is correlated with smaller hippocampal volume at death, even after controlling for race and individual socioeconomic status (Hunt et al., 2020). Mechanistic studies of neighbourhood effects are required to translate findings into interventions to address place-based cognitive health disparities. Given structural inequities, which continue to manifest as socioeconomic segregation (Soja, 2009), multi-faceted solutions are required. Besides inter-subjective variables (e.g., sociocultural practices), intra-subjective responses (e.g., loneliness) further mediate these neighbourhood effects (Gan et al., 2022). Parsing apart these layers of psychosocial variables will allow planning and implementing responsive interventions to mitigate place-based disparities in cognitive health more effectively along the loneliness-cognition axis or the "stress connectome" (Cacioppo et al., 2014; Dum et al., 2019). This project invites older adults as study participants from poorer neighbourhoods to examine psychosocial mechanisms of cognitive health disparities in Detroit and Vancouver. Multi-phase recruitment will be carried out to recruit clusters of older adults with and without experiences of loneliness and/or discrimination within a 2x2 matrix of high/low cohesion and aggregated cognition. Neighbourhood (e.g., atmosphere), psychosocial (e.g., rumination), and cognitive (e.g., semantic fluency) variables will be measured before two structured interviews per person. First, stories of positive and negative informal social experiences in the neighbourhood will be documented at baseline while brain activity is examined with fMRI. Second, selected stories will be played at 6-month and 9-month as stimuli for all participants to examine the protective effect of neighbourhood variables on brain activity during these accounts, controlling for baseline.