Abstract
Age-related declines in visuomotor processing speed can have a large impact on motor performance in elderly individuals. Contrary to previous findings, however, recent studies revealed that elderly individuals are able to quickly react to displacement of a visual target during reaching. Here, we investigated the influence of aging on quick, corrective responses to perturbations during reaching in the terms of their functional contribution to accuracy. Elderly and young adults performed reaching movements to a visual target that could be displaced during reaching, and they were requested to move their hand to reach the final target location as quickly as possible. Results showed that, for the younger group, the variance in the directional error of the corrective response correlated with the variance in the reaching trajectory at the halfway point of the reach, but the correlation decreased at the end of the reaching. On the other hand, such correlations were not significant in elderly participants, although the variance of the directional error did not show a significant difference between age groups. Thus, the quick, corrective response seems to play an important role in decreasing variability, especially before the end of reaching, and aging can impair this process.
Highlights
To interact appropriately with a dynamically changing environment, individuals must continuously correct their motor patterns, even after a planned movement has been initiated
The directional target jump response’’ (TJR) variability was correlated with endpoint variability in young but not elderly participants
It seems that the TJR can contribute to maintaining reaching trajectory stability at the halfway point, and that this function deteriorates with age
Summary
To interact appropriately with a dynamically changing environment, individuals must continuously correct their motor patterns, even after a planned movement has been initiated. Most studies have concluded that deterioration in explicit mental processes, such as stimulus detection and volitional action planning (Chaput and Proteau, 1996; Skoura et al, 2005; Seidler et al, 2010), are the main causes for this agerelated decline. To compensate for these multifactorial age-related changes in sensorimotor systems and achieve a performance level for voluntary motor tasks equivalent to that of young individuals, it is assumed that elderly persons must recruit additional and/or different brain regions.
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