The Dallas Lifespan Brain Study is an ongoing longitudinal study to examine changes in human cognition as well as changes in brain structure and function across the lifespan. This study represents the first systematic investigation of changes in neural activation across the lifespan, including middle-age. The present work is particularly noteworthy in that have integrated structural measures of the brain with functional activation patterns to predict both cognitive function and neural activation for encoding tasks. Few, if any, studies have combined both types of neural measures; the standard paradigm in the aging literature has been to use behavioral differences to predict brain function, rather than the reverse, as we have done.

The study is designed to test the same set of subjects every 4 years with the following measures: 2 days of cognitive behavioral testing, take-home questionnaires, and an MRI scan session. 464 people participated in Wave 1, which was collected between 2008-2014. Approximately 4 years later, between 2012-2017, 338 participants (73%) came back for wave 2 repeated testing.Finally, approximately 4 years later, between 2018-2020,224 participants (48%) came back for wave 3 data collection.