Boosting hyperalignment performance with age-specific templates

Hyperalignment aligns individual brain activity and functional connectivity patterns to a common, high-dimensional model space, resolving idiosyncrasies in functional–anatomical correspondence and revealing shared information encoded in fine-grained spatial patterns. Given that the brain undergoes significant developmental and functional changes over the lifespan, certain features in brain functional organization may be more prominent in certain age groups than others. In this study, we examined whether age-specific functional templates, compared with a canonical template, could enhance alignment accuracy across diverse age groups. We used the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) dataset (18–87 years old) to build age-specific templates and tested their performance in young and old brains in both the Cam-CAN dataset and the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study dataset (20–90 years old). We found the congruent age-specific template outperforms the incongruent template for various analyses, including inter-subject correlation of hyperaligned connectivity profiles and predictions of individualized connectomes and brain responses to the movie. The results are consistent across both datasets. This work enhances our understanding of age-related differences in brain function, highlights the benefits of age-specific templates to refine hyperalignment model performance, and may contribute to the development of age-sensitive diagnostic tools and interventions for neurological disorders.