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If You Are Old, Videos Look Slow. The Paradoxical Effect of Age-Related Motor Decline on the Kinematic Interpretation of Visual Scenes

Perception and action are tightly coupled. However, there is still little recognition of how individual motor constraints impact perception in everyday life. Here we asked whether and how the motor slowing that accompanies aging influences the sense of visual speed. Ninety-four participants aged bet...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: de’Sperati, Claudio, Granato, Marco, Moretti, Michela
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8766849/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35069153
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.783090
Descripción
Sumario:Perception and action are tightly coupled. However, there is still little recognition of how individual motor constraints impact perception in everyday life. Here we asked whether and how the motor slowing that accompanies aging influences the sense of visual speed. Ninety-four participants aged between 18 and 90 judged the natural speed of video clips reproducing real human or physical motion (SoS, Sense-of-Speed adjustment task). They also performed a finger tapping task and a visual search task, which estimated their motor speed and visuospatial attention speed, respectively. Remarkably, aged people judged videos to be too slow (speed underestimation), as compared to younger people: the Point of Subjective Equality (PSE), which estimated the speed bias in the SoS task, was +4% in young adults (<40), +12% in old adults (40–70) and +16% in elders. On average, PSE increased with age at a rate of 0.2% per year, with perceptual precision, adjustment rate, and completion time progressively worsening. Crucially, low motor speed, but not low attentional speed, turned out to be the key predictor of video speed underestimation. These findings suggest the existence of a counterintuitive compensatory coupling between action and perception in judging dynamic scenes, an effect that becomes particularly germane during aging.