From lab to online: Replicating age-related decline in double-step reaching across the lifespan.

Although age-related declines in perceiving spoken language are well established, the primary focus of research has been on perception of phonemes, words, and sentences. In contrast, relatively few investigations have been directed at establishing the effects of age on the comprehension of extended spoken passages. Moreover, most previous work has used extreme-group designs in which the performance of a group of young adults is contrasted with that of a group of older adults and little if any information is available regarding changes in listening comprehension across the adult lifespan. Accordingly, the goals of the current investigation were to determine whether there are age differences in listening comprehension across the adult lifespan and, if so, whether similar trajectories are observed for age-related changes in auditory sensitivity and listening comprehension. This study used a cross-sectional lifespan design in which approximately 60 individuals in each of 7 decades, from age 20 to 89 yr (a total of 433 participants), were tested on three different measures of listening comprehension. In addition, we obtained measures of auditory sensitivity from all participants. Changes in auditory sensitivity across the adult lifespan exhibited the progressive high-frequency loss typical of age-related hearing impairment. Performance on the listening comprehension measures, however, demonstrated a very different pattern, with scores on all measures remaining relatively stable until age 65 to 70 yr, after which significant declines were observed. Follow-up analyses indicated that this same general pattern was observed across three different types of passages (lectures, interviews, and narratives) and three different question types (information, integration, and inference). Multiple regression analyses indicated that low-frequency pure-tone average was the single largest contributor to age-related variance in listening comprehension for individuals older than 65 yr, but that age accounted for significant variance even after controlling for auditory sensitivity. Results suggest that age-related reductions in auditory sensitivity account for a sizable portion of individual variance in listening comprehension that was observed across the adult lifespan. Other potential contributors including a possible role for age-related declines in perceptual and cognitive abilities are discussed. Clinically, the results suggest that amplification is likely to improve listening comprehension but that increased audibility alone may not be sufficient to maintain listening comprehension beyond age 65 and 70 yr. Additional research will be needed to identify potential target abilities for training or other rehabilitation procedures that could supplement sensory aids to provide additional improvements in listening comprehension.

Emotional and cognitive processes interact in myriad ways during daily life, and the relation between emotion and cognition changes across the lifespan. Aging is associated with decreasing cognitive control and inhibition alongside improvements in emotional control and regulation. However, little is known about how aging impacts response inhibition within emotionally relevant contexts. The current study examined how aging impacts emotional response inhibition by comparing older and younger adults' ability to stop responses to emotional images. Participants completed a novel stop-signal task where pleasant and unpleasant scene images appeared on a minority of trials, while participants developed a pre-potent 'go' response during trials presenting neutral shapes. Notably, in each task block only one of the two types of emotional scene images served as a task-relevant stop cue, e.g., unpleasant images as stop-signals. Accordingly, in a given task block participants should continue to respond at the onset of the other type of emotional image (i.e., pleasant scenes as 'go-images'). Overall, older adults exhibited less efficient stopping than younger adults. However, stopping did not differ between pleasant and unpleasant images in either age group. Thus, while response inhibition is less efficient in older adults, it does not differ by emotion across adulthood. The innovative design also permitted exploratory analyses of responses to images that were not the current stop-signal, i.e., responses correctly executed for 'go-image' trials. In contrast with response inhibition on stop trials, emotion and aging significantly interacted during response execution, with older adults performing less accurately than younger adults on unpleasant go-image trials. Taken together, aging interacts with emotion only for response execution but not response inhibition for emotional scenes. This study offers new insights into the effects of aging on response inhibition in emotionally complex contexts and increases the ecological validity of response inhibition research. It also highlights the distinct effects of aging and emotion on response execution versus inhibition for task-relevant emotional information.

Motor neuroplasticity: A MEG-fMRI study of motor imagery and execution in healthy ageing

Assessing motor imagery ability in younger and older adults by combining measures of vividness, controllability and timing of motor imagery

Age-related declines in motor control are well-documented. However, mixed findings are reported on the age-related changes in the ability to rapidly adjust ongoing movements in response to target perturbations. When age-related differences are observed, they are often attributed to a general age-related slowing rather than a specific decline in online correction. The lack of age-related differences is often speculated to result from compensatory strategies or preserved neurocomputational processes for online correction in older adults. This study was to (a) investigate whether there are age-related changes specific to online motor control and (b) explore the association between online motor control and motor imagery ability in older adults, as both processes rely on forward modeling to predict movement outcomes. Fifty-six young and 29 older participants completed a computer-based double-step reaching task. We found that older adults exhibited longer correction latencies, more rigid corrective movements, and reduced endpoint accuracy compared with younger adults. Notably, the prolonged correction times could not be fully explained by general age-related slowing in information processing. While older adults could use a speed-accuracy trade-off to enhance single-step reaching accuracy, this strategy was insufficient for double-step reaching, indicating age-related challenges in online motor correction. Moreover, older adults' online correction and double-step reaching accuracy were linked to their motor imagery ability, suggesting a reliance on forward modeling. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent systematic reviews (Wilson etal., 2013, Dev. Med. Child Neurol., 55, 217; Adams etal., 2014, Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev., 47C, 225) suggest that a common underlying problem in developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is the internal modelling deficit. The study presented here is the first to test this hypothesis using a within-subject design, assessing motor imagery, action planning, and rapid online control (ROC) in a sample of children screened rigorously for DCD. Participants were 66 children; 33 children (26 boys and seven girls) aged 6-11years in the DCD group and 33 controls (gender and age matched). Motor imagery was assessed with the hand rotation task (HRT), action planning with an end-state comfort effect test, and ROC with the double-step pointing task. Results showed that children with DCD were slower and less accurate than controls in the HRT. Reduced forward planning for comfortable end-state was also shown in DCD. Finally, no group differences were found on the ROC task. Collectively, children with DCD manifest deficits in the internal modelling of movements, but this varies under different task constraints, particularly those related to movement complexity.

Postural control declines across adult lifespan. Non-physical balance training has been suggested as an alternative to improve postural control in frail/immobilized elderly people. Previous studies showed that this kind of training can improve balance control in young and older adults. However, it is unclear whether the brain of young and older adults is activated differently during mental simulations of balance tasks. For this purpose, soleus (SOL) and tibialis motor evoked potentials (MEPs) and SOL H-reflexes were elicited while 15 elderly (mean ± SD = 71 ± 4.6 years) and 15 young participants (mean ± SD = 27 ± 4.6 years) mentally simulated static and dynamic balance tasks using motor imagery (MI), action observation (AO) or the combination of AO and MI (AO + MI). Young subjects displayed significant modulations of MEPs that depended on the kind of mental simulation and the postural task. Elderly adults also revealed differences between tasks, but not between mental simulation conditions. Furthermore, the elderly displayed larger MEP facilitation during mental simulation (AGE-GROUP; F(1,28) = 5.9; p = 0.02) in the SOL muscle compared to the young and a task-dependent modulation of the tibialis background electromyography (bEMG) activity. H-reflex amplitudes and bEMG in the SOL showed neither task- nor age-dependent modulation. As neither mental simulation nor balance tasks modulated H-reflexes and bEMG in the SOL muscle, despite large variations in the MEP-amplitudes, there seems to be an age-related change in the internal cortical representation of balance tasks. Moreover, the modulation of the tibialis bEMG in the elderly suggests that aging partially affects the ability to inhibit motor output.

Age-related decline in speech perception is a prominent challenge in auditory aging, especially under noise conditions. However, how neural and neurovascular processes are jointly organized and coordinated across adulthood during speech perception remains incompletely characterized. This study employed simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate neural activation, functional connectivity, and neurovascular coupling across youth (n = 20, aged 28.8 ± 5.7), middle-aged (n = 23, aged 48.0 ± 6.5) and older (n = 23, aged 65.8 ± 3.7) adults with normal hearing. Participants performed speech perception tasks under quiet and noisy listening conditions, with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels of 5dB and - 5dB. Behaviorally, speech recognition performance declined significantly with age under noise conditions but remained preserved in quiet. fNIRS results revealed increased activation and enhanced functional connectivity across frontal-motor and temporal regions in older adults, indicating compensatory recruitment during speech perception in noise. EEG analysis showed age-related reductions in low-frequency (delta, theta, and alpha) power, particularly in motor and auditory-speech areas, reflecting impaired auditory and cognitive processing. Neurovascular coupling analysis further revealed an age-related shift from predominantly positive to negative correlations between EEG power and fNIRS activation, suggesting age-related differences in neurovascular coordination across the adult lifespan. Together, these findings delineate a multilevel pattern of compensatory and maladaptive processes associated with age-related speech perception decline. By integrating electrophysiological and hemodynamic evidence within a unified framework, this study refines existing models of auditory-cognitive aging and highlights age-related alterations in neurovascular coordination that may be relevant for understanding variability in speech processing in older adults.

Speechreading and Aging

Simultaneous EEG-fNIRS reveals how age and feedback affect motor imagery signatures

Age-related neurodegenerative and neurochemical changes are considered to be the basis for the decline of motor function; however, the change of effective connections in cortical motor networks that come with aging remains unclear. Here, we investigated the age-related changes of the dynamic interaction between cortical motor regions. Twenty young subjects and 20 older subjects underwent both right hand motor execution (ME) and right hand motor imagery (MI) tasks by using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Conditional Granger causality analysis (CGCA) was used to compare young and older adults’ effective connectivity among regions of the motor network during the tasks. The more effective connections among motor regions in older adults were found during ME; however, effective within-domain hemisphere connections were reduced, and the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal was significantly delayed in older adults during MI. Supplementary motor area (SMA) had a significantly higher In+Out degree within the network during ME and MI in older adults. Our results revealed a dynamic interaction within the motor network altered with aging during ME and MI, which suggested that the interaction with cortical motor neurons caused by the mental task was more difficult with aging. The age-related effects on the motor cortical network provide a new insight into our understanding of neurodegeneration in older individuals.

Age-related changes in gait coordination are focused on the step-to-step transition.

This study was designed to evaluate binaural temporal processing in young and older adults using a binaural masking level difference (BMLD) paradigm. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures within the same listeners, a series of stimulus manipulations was used to evaluate the relative contribution of binaural temporal fine-structure and temporal envelope cues. We evaluated the hypotheses that age-related declines in the BMLD task would be more strongly associated with temporal fine-structure than envelope cues and that age-related declines in behavioral measures would be correlated with cortical auditory evoked potential (CAEP) measures. Thirty adults participated in the study, including 10 young normal-hearing, 10 older normal-hearing, and 10 older hearing-impaired adults with bilaterally symmetric, mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Behavioral and CAEP thresholds were measured for diotic (So) and dichotic (Sπ) tonal signals presented in continuous diotic (No) narrowband noise (50-Hz wide) maskers. Temporal envelope cues were manipulated by using two different narrowband maskers; Gaussian noise (GN) with robust envelope fluctuations and low-noise noise (LNN) with minimal envelope fluctuations. The potential to use temporal fine-structure cues was controlled by varying the signal frequency (500 or 4000 Hz), thereby relying on the natural decline in phase-locking with increasing frequency. Behavioral and CAEP thresholds were similar across groups for diotic conditions, while the masking release in dichotic conditions was larger for younger than for older participants. Across all participants, BMLDs were larger for GN than LNN and for 500-Hz than for 4000-Hz conditions, where envelope and fine-structure cues were most salient, respectively. Specific age-related differences were demonstrated for 500-Hz dichotic conditions in GN and LNN, reflecting reduced binaural temporal fine-structure coding. No significant age effects were observed for 4000-Hz dichotic conditions, consistent with similar use of binaural temporal envelope cues across age in these conditions. For all groups, thresholds and derived BMLD values obtained using the behavioral and CAEP methods were strongly correlated, supporting the notion that CAEP measures may be useful as an objective index of age-related changes in binaural temporal processing. These results demonstrate an age-related decline in the processing of binaural temporal fine-structure cues with preserved temporal envelope coding that was similar with and without mild-to-moderate peripheral hearing loss. Such age-related changes can be reliably indexed by both behavioral and CAEP measures in young and older adults.

In young adults, performance on a test of response inhibition was recently found to be correlated with performance on a reactive balance test where automated stepping responses must occasionally be inhibited. The present study aimed to determine whether this relationship holds true in older adults, wherein response inhibition is typically deficient and the control of postural equilibrium presents a greater challenge. Ten participants (50+ years of age) completed a seated cognitive test (stop signal task) followed by a reactive balance test. Reactive balance was assessed using a modified lean-and-release system where participants were required to step to regain balance following perturbation, or suppress a step if an obstacle was present. The stop signal task is a standardized cognitive test that provides a measure of the speed of response inhibition called the Stop Signal Reaction Time (SSRT). Muscle responses in the legs were compared between conditions where a step was allowed or blocked to quantify response inhibition of the step. The SSRT was significantly related to leg muscle suppression during balance recovery in the stance leg. Thus, participants that were better at inhibiting their responses in the stop signal task were also better at inhibiting an unwanted leg response in favor of grasping a supportive handle. The relationship between a seated cognitive test using finger responses and leg muscle suppression when a step was blocked indicates a context-independent, generalized capacity for response inhibition. This suggests that a simple cognitive test such as the stop signal task could be used clinically to predict an individual’s capacity for adapting balance reactions and fall risk. The present results provide support for future studies, with larger samples, to verify this relationship between stop signal reaction time and leg response during balance recovery.

Neurofeedback (NF) is a non-invasive endogenous stimulation technique that enables individuals to voluntarily modulate brain activity, which has shown potential to induce neuroplasticity. Among its promising applications is cognitive enhancement in healthy older adults to prevent age-related cognitive decline. However, its efficacy remains controversial due to methodological limitations and a high proportion of individuals unable to achieve effective self-regulation, known as non-responders. This study aimed (1) to evaluate the feasibility of motor imagery (MI)-based NF training in older adults and characterize associated brain activity patterns; and (2) to assess its potential cognitive benefits through a randomized, double-blind, controlled design. Ninety-two healthy participants aged 65–75 were randomly assigned to a training (TG), placebo (PG), or control group (CG). TG and PG completed ten electroencephalography (EEG)-based NF sessions over ten weeks, while CG engaged in ten classical cognitive stimulation sessions. All participants completed a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation prior to and following the intervention. EEG data from the NF training sessions were analyzed using spectral and network metrics to characterize modulations in local activity and large-scale functional network patterns induced by the intervention. Although a substantial proportion of TG participants achieved high MI accuracy values, statistical analyses revealed no cognitive improvements specific to TG, suggesting limited efficacy of the MI-based protocol compared to classical cognitive stimulation. Spectral and network analyses identified distinct modulation patterns during MI in responders, absent in non-responders. Moreover, specific resting-state features—namely increased $$\beta _1$$ (13–20 Hz) band relative power and reduced $$\alpha $$ (8–13 Hz) band node strength—were associated with better self-regulation performance. The present study did not provide conclusive evidence supporting the effectiveness of MI-based NF training for cognitive enhancement in older adults. Nonetheless, the results offer valuable insights that may inform the refinement of future NF-based cognitive training protocols. Moreover, our findings suggest that baseline functional network organization may play a key role in determining the capacity for successful self-regulation. Identifying additional neurophysiological biomarkers will be essential to advance our understanding of the non-responsiveness phenomenon and to enable the development of more personalized NF interventions.