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Switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults
Healthy aging is associated with a variety of functional and structural brain alterations. These age-related brain alterations have been assumed to negatively impact cognitive and motor performance. Especially important for the execution of everyday activities in older adults (OA) is the ability to...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4569733/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26441638 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2015.00176 |
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author | Hoff, Maike Trapp, Sabrina Kaminski, Elisabeth Sehm, Bernhard Steele, Christopher J. Villringer, Arno Ragert, Patrick |
author_facet | Hoff, Maike Trapp, Sabrina Kaminski, Elisabeth Sehm, Bernhard Steele, Christopher J. Villringer, Arno Ragert, Patrick |
author_sort | Hoff, Maike |
collection | PubMed |
description | Healthy aging is associated with a variety of functional and structural brain alterations. These age-related brain alterations have been assumed to negatively impact cognitive and motor performance. Especially important for the execution of everyday activities in older adults (OA) is the ability to perform movements that depend on both hands working together. However, bimanual coordination is typically deteriorated with increasing age. Hence, a deeper understanding of such age-related brain-behavior alterations might offer the opportunity to design future interventional studies in order to delay or even prevent the decline in cognitive and/or motor performance over the lifespan. Here, we examined to what extent the capability to acquire and maintain a novel bimanual motor skill is still preserved in healthy OA as compared to their younger peers (YA). For this purpose, we investigated performance of OA (n = 26) and YA (n = 26) in a bimanual serial reaction time task (B-SRTT), on two experimental sessions, separated by 1 week. We found that even though OA were generally slower in global response times, they showed preserved learning capabilities in the B-SRTT. However, sequence specific learning was more pronounced in YA as compared to OA. Furthermore, we found that switching between hands during B-SRTT learning trials resulted in increased response times (hand switch costs), a phenomenon that was more pronounced in OA. These hand switch costs were reduced in both groups over the time course of learning. More interestingly, there were no group differences in hand switch costs on the second training session. These results provide novel evidence that bimanual motor skill learning is capable of reducing age-related deficits in hand switch costs, a finding that might have important implications to prevent the age-related decline in sensorimotor function. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4569733 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-45697332015-10-05 Switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults Hoff, Maike Trapp, Sabrina Kaminski, Elisabeth Sehm, Bernhard Steele, Christopher J. Villringer, Arno Ragert, Patrick Front Aging Neurosci Neuroscience Healthy aging is associated with a variety of functional and structural brain alterations. These age-related brain alterations have been assumed to negatively impact cognitive and motor performance. Especially important for the execution of everyday activities in older adults (OA) is the ability to perform movements that depend on both hands working together. However, bimanual coordination is typically deteriorated with increasing age. Hence, a deeper understanding of such age-related brain-behavior alterations might offer the opportunity to design future interventional studies in order to delay or even prevent the decline in cognitive and/or motor performance over the lifespan. Here, we examined to what extent the capability to acquire and maintain a novel bimanual motor skill is still preserved in healthy OA as compared to their younger peers (YA). For this purpose, we investigated performance of OA (n = 26) and YA (n = 26) in a bimanual serial reaction time task (B-SRTT), on two experimental sessions, separated by 1 week. We found that even though OA were generally slower in global response times, they showed preserved learning capabilities in the B-SRTT. However, sequence specific learning was more pronounced in YA as compared to OA. Furthermore, we found that switching between hands during B-SRTT learning trials resulted in increased response times (hand switch costs), a phenomenon that was more pronounced in OA. These hand switch costs were reduced in both groups over the time course of learning. More interestingly, there were no group differences in hand switch costs on the second training session. These results provide novel evidence that bimanual motor skill learning is capable of reducing age-related deficits in hand switch costs, a finding that might have important implications to prevent the age-related decline in sensorimotor function. Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-09-15 /pmc/articles/PMC4569733/ /pubmed/26441638 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2015.00176 Text en Copyright © 2015 Hoff, Trapp, Kaminski, Sehm, Steele, Villringer and Ragert. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Hoff, Maike Trapp, Sabrina Kaminski, Elisabeth Sehm, Bernhard Steele, Christopher J. Villringer, Arno Ragert, Patrick Switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults |
title | Switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults |
title_full | Switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults |
title_fullStr | Switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults |
title_full_unstemmed | Switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults |
title_short | Switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults |
title_sort | switching between hands in a serial reaction time task: a comparison between young and old adults |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4569733/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26441638 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2015.00176 |
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