Thread by @jjodx

New preprint with @KoenVdvoorde where we investigate what goes wrong with the explicit component of motor adaptation in elderly adults.

#tweeprint time:

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https://twitter.com/biorxivpreprint/status/1168706627706507264

It all started from the following observation: @KoenVdvoorde previously showed that the explicit component of adaptation but not the implicit one declines with aging (sciencedirect.com/science/articl…)

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but this contrasts with papers showing that elderly adults usually rely on cognition to maintain good motor performance in motor tasks:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16033888
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18171926

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This idea of the penetration of cognition into action is also consistent with the fact that older adults have higher dual-task costs during motor tasks such as standing and walking

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

matthieuboisgontier.com/doc/publicatio…

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Therefore, we reasoned that the explicit component of motor adaptation is limited in elderly adults because they already use all their cognitive resources for the simple reaching movements towards the targets

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but this hypothesis did not seem to hold because 1/ the dual task-cost during baseline was similar for young and elderly adults

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We expected that the higher the dual-task cost during baseline (more cognitive resources used for simple reaching movements) the lower the explicit component of motor adaptation would be but we could not confirm this prediction

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Rather, the explicit component of adaptation was linked to the working memory capacity in both experiments, suggesting that cognition is probably an important factor for the explicit component of motor adaptation.

(replication of: nature.com/articles/srep3…)

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In this paper, we used pre-registration for experiment 1. For both experiments: large groups (N>30) and a conceptual replication. Data and code are available at osf.io/ks2j8/

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