Abstract
The question of whether and how aging affects humans’ visuomotor adaptation remains controversial. This study investigates how the effect of aging on visuomotor adaptation is related to age-related cognitive declines. We compared the performance of 100 older people (age: 55–82 years) and 20 young adults (age: 18–27 years) on a visuomotor adaptation task and three cognition tasks. A decline in visuomotor adaptation of older people was well observed. However, this decline was not strongly correlated with chronological age increase but was associated to the age-related declines of cognitive functions and speed of motor planning. We then constructed a structural mediation model in which the declined cognitive resources mediated the effect of age increase on the decline in visuomotor adaptation. The data from the present study was well-explained by the mediation model. These findings indicate that the aging effect on visuomotor adaptation mainly reflects the age-related decline of cognitive functions, which results in insufficient explicit processing on visual perturbation during visuomotor control.
Highlights
One fundamental function of humans’ sensorimotor system is to adapt to extrinsic and/or intrinsic environmental changes
This study aimed to systematically investigate how aging effects on visuomotor adaptation vary across different age groups and the association between aging effects of visuomotor adaptation and the decline of cognitive functions, using a relatively large sample of older people (100 people) whose ages were evenly distributed in a wide range (56–82 years old)
We tested a structural mediation model, in which we hypothesized a latent variable, entitled “cognitive resource,” both accounted for performance on the cognitive tests and speed of motor planning and mediated the effect from chronological age to adaptive angular deviation
Summary
One fundamental function of humans’ sensorimotor system is to adapt to extrinsic and/or intrinsic environmental changes. This function of visuomotor adaptation has been extensively studied by examining rapid adaptation in simple reaching tasks with deviated visual feedback. With this approach, many studies have found evidence that healthy young people can rapidly adapt to visual feedback deviation (i.e., extrinsic environmental changes) in simple reaching tasks (e.g., Krakauer et al, 1999; Ghilardi et al, 2000; Taylor and Ivry, 2013; Galea et al, 2015; Haar et al, 2015). Multiple studies found that older adults had significantly weaker adaptation
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