Abstract
Older adults require more time to reweight sensory information for maintaining balance that could potentially lead to increased incidence of falling in rapidly changing or cognitively demanding environments. In this study, we manipulated the visual surround information during a collision avoidance task in order to investigate how young and elderly adults engage in sensory reweighting under conditions of visual anticipation. Sixteen healthy elderly (age: 71.5 ± 4.9 years; height: 159.3 ± 6.6 cm; mass: 73.3 ± 3.3 kg) and 20 young (age: 22.8 ± 3.3 years; height: 174.4 ± 10.7 cm; mass: 70.1 ± 13.9 kg) participants stood for 240 s on a force platform under two experimental conditions: quiet standing and standing while anticipating randomly approaching virtual objects to be avoided. During both tasks, the visual surround changed every 60 s from a stationary virtual scene (room) to either a moving room or darkness and then back to a stationary scene to evoke sensory reweighting processes. In quiet standing, elderly showed greater sway variability and were more severely affected by the removal or degradation of visual surround information when compared to young participants. During visual anticipation, sway variability was not different between the age groups. In addition, both young and elderly participants were similarly affected by the degradation or removal of the visual surround. These findings suggest that sensory reweighting in a dynamic virtual environment that evokes visual anticipation interacts with postural state anxiety regardless of age. Elderly show less efficient sensory reweighting in quiet standing due to greater visual field dependence possibly associated with fear of falling.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adkin AL, Frank JS, Carpenter MG, Peysar GW (2000) Postural control is scaled to level of postural threat. Gait Posture 12:87–93
Allison LK, Kiemel T, Jeka JJ (2006) Multisensory reweighting of vision and touch is intact in healthy and fall-prone older adults. Exp Brain Res 175:342–352
Balaban CD, Thayer JF (2001) Neurological bases for balance–anxiety links. J Anxiety Disord 15:53–79
Bolmont B, Gangloff P, Vouriot A, Perrin PP (2002) Mood states and anxiety influence abilities to maintain balance control in healthy human subjects. Neurosci Lett 329:96–100
Brown LA, Sleik RJ, Polych MA, Gage WH (2002) Is the prioritization of postural control altered in conditions of postural threat in younger and older adults? J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci 57:785–792
Brown LA, Polych MA, Doan JB (2006) The effect of anxiety on the regulation of upright standing among younger and older adults. Gait Posture 24:397–405
Brumagne S, Janssens L, Janssens E, Goddyn L (2008) Altered postural control in anticipation of postural instability in persons with recurrent low back pain. Gait Posture 28:657–662
Carpenter MG, Frank JS, Silcher CP, Peysar GW (2001) The influence of postural threat on the control of upright stance. Exp Brain Res 138:210–218
Doumas M, Krampe RT (2010) Adaptation and reintegration of proprioceptive information in young and older adults’ postural control. J Neurophysiol 104(4):1969–1977
Glasauer S, Schneider E, Jahn K, Strupp M, Brandt T (2005) How the eyes move the body. Neurology 65:1291–1293
Guerraz M, Sakellari V, Burchill P, Bronstein AM (2000) Influence of motion parallax in the control of spontaneous body sway. Exp Brain Res 131:244–252
Hainaut JP, Caillet G, Lestienne FG, Bolmont B (2011) The role of trait anxiety on static balance performance in control and anxiogenic situations. Gait Posture 33:604–608
Hatzitaki V, Amiridis IG, Arabatzi F (2005) Aging effects on postural responses to self-imposed perturbations. Gait Posture 22:250–257
Herry C, Bach DR, Esposito F, Di Salle F, Perrig WJ, Scheffler K, Lüthi A, Seifritz E (2007) Processing of temporal unpredictability in human and animal amygdala. J Neurosci 27:5958–5966
Holmberg J, Tjernström F, Karlberg M, Fransson PA, Magnusson M (2009) Reduced postural differences between phobic postural vertigo patients and healthy subjects during a postural threat. J Neurol 256:1258–1262
Horak FB, Shupert CL, Mirka A (1989) Components of dyscontrol in the elderly: a review. Neurobiol Aging 10:727–738
Isableu B, Ohlmann T, Crémieux J, Amblard B (1998) How dynamic visual field dependence–independence interacts with the visual contribution to postural control. Hum Mov Sci 17:367–391
Ishida M, Saitoh J, Wada M, Nagai M (2010) Effects of anticipatory anxiety and visual input on postural sway in an aversive situation. Neurosci Lett 474:1–4
Jamet M, Deviterne D, Gauchard GC, Vançon G, Perrin PP (2004) Higher visual dependency increases balance control perturbation during cognitive task fulfilment in elderly people. Neurosci Lett 359:61–64
Jeka J, Allison L, Saffer M, Zhang Y, Carver S, Kiemel T (2006) Sensory reweighting with translational visual stimuli in young and elderly adults: the role of state dependent noise. Exp Brain Res 174:517–527
Jeka JJ, Oie KS, Kiemel T (2008) Asymmetric adaptation with functional advantage in human sensorimotor control. Exp Brain Res 19:453–463
Laurens J, Awai L, Bockish CJ, Hegemann S, van Hedel HJA, Dietz V, Straumann D (2010) Visual contribution to postural stability: interaction between target fixation or tracking and static or dynamic large-field stimulus. Gait Posture 31:37–41
Lord SR, Clark RD, Webster IW (1991) Physiological factors associated with falls in an elderly population. J Am Geriatr Soc 39:1194–1200
Mahboobin A, Loughlin PJ, Redfern MS, Sparto PJ (2005) Sensory re-weighting in human postural control during moving-scene perturbations. Exp Brain Res 167:260–267
Maki BE, Holliday PJ, Topper AK (1991) Fear of falling and postural performance in the elderly. J Gerontol 46:123–131
Ohno H, Wada M, Saitoh J, Sunaga N, Nagai M (2004) The effect of anxiety on postural control depends on visual information processing. Neurosci Lett 364:37–39
Oie KS, Kiemel T, Jeka JJ (2002) Multisensory fusion: simultaneous re-weighting of vision and touch for the control of human posture. Cogn Brain Res 14:164–176
Peterka RJ (2002) Sensorimotor integration in human postural control. J Neurophysiol 88:1097–1118
Peterka RJ, Loughlin PJ (2004) Dynamic regulation of sensorimotor integration in human postural control. J Neurophysiol 91:410–423
Reger GM, McGee JS, van der Zaag C, Thiebaux M, Buckwalter JG, Rizzo AA (2003) A 3D virtual environment rod and frame test: the reliability and validity of four traditional scoring methods for older adults. J Clin Exp Neuropsychol 25:1169–1177
Salthouse TA (2000) Aging and measures of processing speed. Biol Psychol 54:35–54
Teasdale N, Simoneau M (2001) Attentional demands for postural control the effects of aging and sensory integration. Gait Posture 14:203–210
Wada M, Sunaga N, Nagai M (2001) Anxiety affects the postural sway of the antero-posterior axis in college students. Neurosci Lett 302:157–159
Yardley L, Smith H (2002) A prospective study of the relationship between feared consequences of falling and avoidance of activity in community-living older people. Gerontol 42:17–23
Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under grant agreement number 214728–2.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
About this article
Cite this article
Eikema, D.J.A., Hatzitaki, V., Tzovaras, D. et al. Age-dependent modulation of sensory reweighting for controlling posture in a dynamic virtual environment. AGE 34, 1381–1392 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-011-9310-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-011-9310-9