Age-related differences in the motor planning of a lower leg target matching task

Although it is well appreciated that practicing a motor task updates the associated internal model, it is still unknown how the cortical oscillations linked with the motor action change with practice. The present study investigates the short-term changes (e.g., fast motor learning) in the α- and β-event-related desynchronizations (ERD) associated with the production of a motor action. To this end, we used magnetoencephalography to identify changes in the α- and β-ERD in healthy adults after participants practiced a novel isometric ankle plantarflexion target-matching task. After practicing, the participants matched the targets faster and had improved accuracy, faster force production, and a reduced amount of variability in the force output when trying to match the target. Parallel with the behavioral results, the strength of the β-ERD across the motor-planning and execution stages was reduced after practice in the sensorimotor and occipital cortexes. No pre/postpractice changes were found in the α-ERD during motor planning or execution. Together, these outcomes suggest that fast motor learning is associated with a decrease in β-ERD power. The decreased strength likely reflects a more refined motor plan, a reduction in neural resources needed to perform the task, and/or an enhancement of the processes that are involved in the visuomotor transformations that occur before the onset of the motor action. These results may augment the development of neurologically based practice strategies and/or lead to new practice strategies that increase motor learning. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We aimed to determine the effects of practice on the movement-related cortical oscillatory activity. Following practice, we found that the performance of the ankle plantarflexion target-matching task improved and the power of the β-oscillations decreased in the sensorimotor and occipital cortexes. These novel findings capture the β-oscillatory activity changes in the sensorimotor and occipital cortexes that are coupled with behavioral changes to demonstrate the effects of motor learning.

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Congruency effects can compensate for deficits of healthy older adults in crossmodal integration

10.1101/673491 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Focko L. Higgen ◽

Charlotte Heine ◽

Lutz Krawinkel ◽

Florian Göschl ◽

Andreas K. Engel ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Poor Performance ◽

Matching Task ◽

Crossmodal Integration ◽

Sensory Stimuli ◽

Healthy Older Adults ◽

Cognitive Domains ◽

Age Related ◽

Sensory Impairments ◽

Tactile Detection ◽

Simultaneous Input

AbstractOne of the pivotal challenges of aging is to maintain independence in the activities of daily life. In order to adapt to changes in the environment, it is crucial to continuously process and accurately combine simultaneous input from different sensory systems, i.e., crossmodal integration.With aging, performance decreases in multiple cognitive domains. The processing of sensory stimuli constitutes one of the key features of this deterioration. Age-related sensory impairments affect all modalities, substantiated by decreased acuity in visual, auditory or tactile detection tasks.However, whether this decline of sensory processing leads to impairments in crossmodal integration remains an unresolved question. While some researchers propose that crossmodal integration degrades with age, others suggest that it is conserved or even gains compensatory importance.To address this question, we compared behavioral performance of older and young participants in a well-established crossmodal matching task, requiring the evaluation of congruency in simultaneously presented visual and tactile patterns. Older participants performed significantly worse than young controls in the crossmodal task when being stimulated at their individual unimodal visual and tactile perception thresholds. Performance increased with adjustment of stimulus intensities. This improvement was driven by better detection of congruent stimulus pairs (p<0.01), while detection of incongruent pairs was not significantly enhanced (p=0.12).These results indicate that age-related impairments lead to poor performance in complex crossmodal scenarios and demanding cognitive tasks. Performance is enhanced when inputs to the visual and tactile systems are congruent. Congruency effects might therefore be used to develop strategies for cognitive training and neurological rehabilitation.

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Effects of side-dominance on knee joint proprioceptive target-matching asymmetries

Physiology International ◽

10.1556/2060.105.2018.3.22 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 105 (3) ◽

pp. 257-265 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

K Galamb ◽

B Szilágyi ◽

OM Magyar ◽

T Hortobágyi ◽

R Nagatomi ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Knee Joint ◽

Right Hemisphere ◽

Position Sense ◽

Matching Task ◽

Isokinetic Dynamometer ◽

Absolute Position ◽

Position Errors ◽

Side Dominance ◽

Target Matching ◽

Hemisphere Specialization

Aims Right- and left-side-dominant individuals reveal target-matching asymmetries between joints of the dominant and non-dominant upper limbs. However, it is unclear if such asymmetries are also present in lower limb’s joints. We hypothesized that right-side-dominant participants perform knee joint target-matching tasks more accurately with their non-dominant leg compared to left-side-dominant participants. Methods Participants performed position sense tasks using each leg by moving each limb separately and passively on an isokinetic dynamometer. Results Side-dominance affected (p < 0.05) knee joint absolute position errors only in the non-dominant leg but not in the dominant leg: right-side-dominant participants produced less absolute position errors (2.82° ± 0.72°) with the non-dominant leg compared to left-side-dominant young participants (3.54° ± 0.33°). Conclusions In conclusion, right-side-dominant participants tend to perform a target-matching task more accurately with the non-dominant leg compared to left-side-dominant participants. Our results extend the literature by showing that right-hemisphere specialization under proprioceptive target-matching tasks may be not evident at the lower limb joints.

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Reduced Facilitation of Parietal-Motor Functional Connections in Older Adults

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience ◽

10.3389/fnagi.2021.595288 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 ◽

Author(s):

Elana R. Goldenkoff ◽

Rachel N. Logue ◽

Susan H. Brown ◽

Michael Vesia

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Young Adults ◽

Functional Connectivity ◽

Neural Control ◽

Posterior Parietal Cortex ◽

Primary Motor Cortex ◽

Critical Role ◽

Motor Planning ◽

Functional Connections ◽

Age Related

Age-related changes in cortico-cortical connectivity in the human motor network in older adults are associated with declines in hand dexterity. Posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is strongly interconnected with motor areas and plays a critical role in many aspects of motor planning. Functional connectivity measures derived from dual-site transcranial magnetic stimulation (dsTMS) studies have found facilitatory inputs from PPC to ipsilateral primary motor cortex (M1) in younger adults. In this study, we investigated whether facilitatory inputs from PPC to M1 are altered by age. We used dsTMS in a conditioning-test paradigm to characterize patterns of functional connectivity between the left PPC and ipsilateral M1 and a standard pegboard test to assess skilled hand motor function in 13 young and 13 older adults. We found a PPC-M1 facilitation in young adults but not older adults. Older adults also showed a decline in motor performance compared to young adults. We conclude that the reduced PPC-M1 facilitation in older adults may be an early marker of age-related decline in the neural control of movement.

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Attention and Memory-Related Responses of Neurons in the Lateral Intraparietal Area During Spatial and Shape-Delayed Match-to-Sample Tasks

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00431.2005 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 95 (2) ◽

pp. 1078-1098 ◽

Cited By ~ 54

Author(s):

Anne B. Sereno ◽

Silvia C. Amador

Keyword(s):

Shape Matching ◽

Posterior Parietal Cortex ◽

Motor Planning ◽

Delay Period ◽

Matching Task ◽

Attention And Memory ◽

Lateral Intraparietal Area ◽

Match To Sample ◽

Posterior Parietal ◽

Active Processes

When a monkey attends to, remembers, and looks toward targets, the activity of some neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) changes. We recorded from isolated neurons during both a spatial and a shape match-to-sample task to examine and characterize voluntary active processes in LIP. Many LIP neurons show spatially selective activity during the delay period that depends on the location of the sample, but for most cells, this activity does not differ between the two tasks. Although much past work in posterior parietal cortex has explained responses in this region in terms of active processes such as decision-making and motor planning, our findings suggest that much of that activity represents more passive processing. Nevertheless, we do see a significant minority of units that demonstrate instruction-dependent activity during the delay period, suggesting that these units could represent the neural correlates of voluntary or active processes. Separately, we found that during the presentation of the sample stimulus and test array, some units show stronger responses to the stimulus in the shape-matching task when the animal must attend to the shape of a stimulus. This elevated response to the sample during the shape task provides evidence for feature-based attention in LIP. Attention to shape is a property that has not previously been described in primate cortex.

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Evidence for Multisensory Spatial-to-Motor Transformations in Aiming Movements of Children

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.90781.2008 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 101 (1) ◽

pp. 315-322 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Bradley R. King ◽

Florian A. Kagerer ◽

Jose L. Contreras-Vidal ◽

Jane E. Clark

Keyword(s):

Motor Coordination ◽

Age Groups ◽

Motor Planning ◽

Visuomotor Rotation ◽

Visuomotor Coordination ◽

Aiming Movements ◽

Movement Trajectories ◽

Acoustic Stimuli ◽

Age Related ◽

Before And After

The extant developmental literature investigating age-related differences in the execution of aiming movements has predominantly focused on visuomotor coordination, despite the fact that additional sensory modalities, such as audition and somatosensation, may contribute to motor planning, execution, and learning. The current study investigated the execution of aiming movements toward both visual and acoustic stimuli. In addition, we examined the interaction between visuomotor and auditory-motor coordination as 5- to 10-yr-old participants executed aiming movements to visual and acoustic stimuli before and after exposure to a visuomotor rotation. Children in all age groups demonstrated significant improvement in performance under the visuomotor perturbation, as indicated by decreased initial directional and root mean squared errors. Moreover, children in all age groups demonstrated significant visual aftereffects during the postexposure phase, suggesting a successful update of their spatial-to-motor transformations. Interestingly, these updated spatial-to-motor transformations also influenced auditory-motor performance, as indicated by distorted movement trajectories during the auditory postexposure phase. The distorted trajectories were present during auditory postexposure even though the auditory-motor relationship was not manipulated. Results suggest that by the age of 5 yr, children have developed a multisensory spatial-to-motor transformation for the execution of aiming movements toward both visual and acoustic targets.

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Age-related effects of novel visual stimuli in a letter-matching task: an event-related potential study

Biological Psychology ◽

10.1016/j.biopsycho.2004.06.006 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 69 (2) ◽

pp. 229-242 ◽

Cited By ~ 29

Author(s):

István Czigler ◽

László Balázs

Keyword(s):

Visual Stimuli ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Matching Task ◽

Potential Study ◽

Age Related

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Age-Related Shift in Neuro-Activation during a Word-Matching Task

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience ◽

10.3389/fnagi.2017.00265 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Ikram Methqal ◽

Jean-Sebastien Provost ◽

Maximiliano A. Wilson ◽

Oury Monchi ◽

Mahnoush Amiri ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Matching Task ◽

Age Related

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Active inference under visuo-proprioceptive conflict: Simulation and empirical results

10.1101/795419 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Jakub Limanowski ◽

Karl Friston

Keyword(s):

Sensory Modality ◽

Predictive Coding ◽

Body Representation ◽

Matching Task ◽

Active Inference ◽

Agent Based ◽

Human Participants ◽

The Impact ◽

The Brain ◽

Target Matching

AbstractIt has been suggested that the brain controls hand movements via internal models that rely on visual and proprioceptive cues about the state of the hand. In active inference formulations of such models, the relative influence of each modality on action and perception is determined by how precise (reliable) it is expected to be. The ‘top-down’ affordance of expected precision to a particular sensory modality is associated with attention. Here, we asked whether increasing attention to (i.e., the precision of) vision or proprioception would enhance performance in a hand-target phase matching task, in which visual and proprioceptive cues about hand posture were incongruent. We show that in a simple simulated agent—based on predictive coding formulations of active inference—increasing the expected precision of vision or proprioception improved task performance (target matching with the seen or felt hand, respectively) under visuo-proprioceptive conflict. Moreover, we show that this formulation captured the behaviour and self-reported attentional allocation of human participants performing the same task in a virtual reality environment. Together, our results show that selective attention can balance the impact of (conflicting) visual and proprioceptive cues on action—rendering attention a key mechanism for a flexible body representation for action.

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Aging Effect on Visuomotor Adaptation: Mediated by Cognitive Decline

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience ◽

10.3389/fnagi.2021.742928 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 ◽

Author(s):

Na Li ◽

Guopeng Chen ◽

Yong Xie ◽

Zhongting Chen

Keyword(s):

Older People ◽

Cognitive Functions ◽

Motor Planning ◽

Aging Effect ◽

Visuomotor Adaptation ◽

Cognitive Resources ◽

Strongly Correlated ◽

Mediation Model ◽

Age Related ◽

Visual Perturbation

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.

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