Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Centre for Vision Research, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
PLoS One. 2024 Jul 11;19(7):e0306276. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0306276. eCollection 2024.
Being able to adapt our movements to changing circumstances allows people to maintain performance across a wide range of tasks throughout life, but it is unclear whether visuomotor learning abilities are fully developed in young children and, if so, whether they remain stable in the elderly. There is limited evidence of changes in motor adaptation ability throughout life, and the findings are inconsistent. Therefore, our goal was to compare visuomotor learning abilities throughout the lifespan. We used a shorter, gamified experimental task and collected data from participants in 5 age groups. Young children (M = 7 years), older children (M = 11 years), young adults (M = 20 years), adults (M = 40 years) and older adults (M = 67 years) adapted to a 45° visuomotor rotation in a centre-out reaching task. Across measures of rate of adaptation, extent of learning, rate of unlearning, generalization, and savings, we found that all groups performed similarly. That is, at least for short bouts of gamified learning, children and older adults perform just as well as young adults.
能够根据不断变化的环境调整动作，使人们能够在一生中的各种任务中保持表现，但目前尚不清楚儿童的运动学习能力是否完全发展，以及它们在老年人中是否保持稳定。一生中运动适应能力变化的证据有限，且结果不一致。因此，我们的目标是比较整个生命周期中的视觉运动学习能力。我们使用了一个更短、游戏化的实验任务，并从 5 个年龄组的参与者中收集数据。幼儿（M=7 岁）、大龄儿童（M=11 岁）、年轻成年人（M=20 岁）、成年人（M=40 岁）和老年人（M=67 岁）适应了中心向外伸展任务中的 45°视觉运动旋转。在适应速度、学习程度、遗忘速度、泛化和节省等方面的测量中，我们发现所有组的表现都相似。也就是说，至少在短时间的游戏化学习中，儿童和老年人的表现与年轻人一样好。
