Movement Control and Neuroplasticity Research Group, Department of Movement Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Leuven Brain Institute, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
J Neurophysiol. 2021 Oct 1;126(4):1326-1344. doi: 10.1152/jn.00636.2020. Epub 2021 Aug 4.
The ability to adjust movements to changes in the environment declines with aging. This age-related decline is caused by the decline of explicit adjustments. However, implicit adaptation remains intact and might even be increased with aging. Since proprioceptive information has been linked to implicit adaptation, it might well be that an age-related decline in proprioceptive acuity might be linked to the performance of older adults in implicit adaptation tasks. Indeed, age-related proprioceptive deficits could lead to altered sensory integration with an increased weighting of the visual sensory-prediction error. Another possibility is that reduced proprioceptive acuity results in an increased reliance on predicted sensory consequences of the movement. Both these explanations led to our preregistered hypothesis: we expected a relation between the decline of proprioception and the amount of implicit adaptation across ages. However, we failed to support this hypothesis. Our results question the existence of reliability-based integration of visual and proprioceptive signals during motor adaptation. Is proprioceptive acuity linked to amount of implicit motor adaptation across ages? The latter is larger in old compared with younger people? In light of reliability-based sensory integration, we hypothesized that this larger implicit adaptation was linked to an age-related lower reliability of proprioception. Over 2 experiments and 130 participants, we failed to find any evidence for this. We discussed alternative explanations for the increase in implicit adaptation with age and the validity of our proprioceptive assessment.
随着年龄的增长,人们适应环境变化的能力会下降。这种与年龄相关的下降是由于显式调整的下降引起的。然而,内隐适应仍然完好无损,甚至随着年龄的增长而增加。由于本体感觉信息与内隐适应有关,因此,本体感觉敏锐度的与年龄相关的下降可能与老年人在内隐适应任务中的表现有关。事实上,与年龄相关的本体感觉缺陷可能导致感觉整合的改变,增加对视觉感觉预测误差的权重。另一种可能性是,本体感觉敏锐度的降低导致对运动预测感觉后果的依赖性增加。这两种解释都导致了我们预先注册的假设:我们预计本体感觉的下降与各年龄段的内隐适应量之间存在关系。然而,我们未能支持这一假设。我们的结果质疑了在运动适应过程中视觉和本体感觉信号基于可靠性的整合的存在。本体感觉敏锐度与各年龄段的内隐运动适应量有关吗?老年人的内隐适应比年轻人更大?基于可靠性的感觉整合,我们假设这种更大的内隐适应与本体感觉的年龄相关的可靠性降低有关。在两个实验和 130 名参与者中,我们没有发现任何证据支持这一假设。我们讨论了年龄增长时内隐适应增加的替代解释以及我们本体感觉评估的有效性。