Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Boston University, USA.
Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Boston University, USA.
Hum Mov Sci. 2021 Jun;77:102798. doi: 10.1016/j.humov.2021.102798. Epub 2021 Apr 12.
Humans readily entrain their movements to a beat, including matching their gait to a prescribed tempo. Rhythmic auditory cueing tasks have been used to enhance stepping behavior in a variety of clinical populations. However, there is limited understanding of how temporal accuracy of gait changes over practice in healthy young adults. In this study, we examined how inter-step interval and cadence deviated from slow, medium, and fast tempos across steps within trials, across trials within blocks, and across two blocks that bookended a period of practice of walking to each tempo. Participants were accurate in matching the tempo at the slow and medium tempos, while they tended to lag behind the beat at the fast tempo. We also found that participants showed no substantial improvement across steps and trials, nor across blocks, suggesting that participants had a robust ability to entrain their gait to the specified metronome tempo. However, we did find that participants habituated to the prescribed tempo, showing self-paced gait that was faster than self-paced baseline gait after the fast tempo, and slower than self-paced baseline gait after the slow tempo. These findings might represent an "after-effect" in the temporal domain, akin to after-effects consistently shown in other sensorimotor tasks. This knowledge of how healthy participants entrain their gait to temporal cues may have important implications in understanding how clinical populations acquire and modify their gait in rhythmic auditory cueing tasks.
人类很容易根据节奏调整自己的动作，包括使自己的步伐与规定的节奏相匹配。节奏听觉提示任务已被用于增强各种临床人群的踏步行为。然而，对于健康的年轻人在练习过程中步态的时间准确性如何变化，我们的理解有限。在这项研究中，我们研究了在每一个节奏的练习过程中，参与者在步伐内、块内和两个块之间，如何从慢、中、快节奏中偏离步伐的步间间隔和节奏。参与者在慢和中节奏下准确地匹配了节奏，而在快节奏下则往往落后于节奏。我们还发现，参与者在步伐和试验中都没有明显的改善，也没有在块之间改善，这表明参与者有很强的能力使他们的步伐与指定的节拍器节奏同步。然而，我们确实发现参与者习惯了规定的节奏，在快速节奏后，他们的步伐比自我节奏的基线步伐更快，在慢节奏后，他们的步伐比自我节奏的基线步伐更慢。这些发现可能代表了时间域中的一种“后效”，类似于在其他感觉运动任务中始终显示的后效。了解健康参与者如何根据时间线索调整他们的步态，可能对理解临床人群如何在节奏听觉提示任务中获得和调整他们的步态有重要意义。
