Journal Article

Visuomotor adaptation across the lifespan

Henriques, Denise Y. P., Clayton, Holly A., Abbas, Sahir, t Hart, Bernard Marius

2024

Overview

Being able to adapt our movements to changing circumstances allows people to maintain performance across a wide range of tasks throughout life, but it is unclear whether visuomotor learning abilities are fully developed in young children and, if so, whether they remain stable in the elderly. There is limited evidence of changes in motor adaptation ability throughout life, and the findings are inconsistent. Therefore, our goal was to compare visuomotor learning abilities throughout the lifespan. We used a shorter, gamified experimental task and collected data from participants in 5 age groups. Young children (M = 7 years), older children (M = 11 years), young adults (M = 20 years), adults (M = 40 years) and older adults (M = 67 years) adapted to a 45° visuomotor rotation in a centre-out reaching task. Across measures of rate of adaptation, extent of learning, rate of unlearning, generalization, and savings, we found that all groups performed similarly. That is, at least for short bouts of gamified learning, children and older adults perform just as well as young adults.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Adaptation / Adaptation level (Psychology) / Adaptation, Physiological / Adolescent / Adult / Adults / Age groups / Aged / Aging - physiology / Analysis / Biology and Life Sciences / Child / Children / Engineering and Technology / Evaluation / Experiments / Female / Females / Humans / Learning / Learning - physiology / Life span / Male / Middle Aged / Motor ability / Motor skill learning / Older people / Participation / People and Places / Psychomotor Performance - physiology / Research and Analysis Methods / Sensorimotor integration / Social Sciences / Young Adult / Young adults