Temporal features of imagined locomotion in normal aging

doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2010.04.017

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 476, Issue 3, 7 June 2010, Pages 146-149

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2010.04.017 Get rights and content

Abstract

Motor imagery is the ability to mentally simulate a movement without executing it. Previous investigations have reported a deterioration of this ability during complex arm movements in aged adults. In the present study, we aimed to extend these findings by investigating the temporal features of imagined precision gait in healthy elderly adults. Locomotion is a unique example of imagined movement because it involves simulated full-body movement and the concurrent updating of environmental spatial information. Nine young and nine older adults actually or mentally walked (walking distance: 5 m) along three paths having different widths (15 cm, 25 cm, and 50 cm). The narrowest path required balance control and accurate foot placement. We used the mental chronometry paradigm, notably the temporal similarity between actual and imagined movements, as an indicator of the accuracy of the motor imagery process. Our findings indicated that while motor imagery ability was preserved in the young group whatever the width of the path, it was significantly deteriorated in the elderly group. Aged adults systematically overestimated the duration of imagined movements with respect to those of executed movements. Moreover, paths width negatively influenced the motor imagery performances in the elderly group. We assume that motor imagery decline may reflect functional changes in the aging brain, and could be a clinical tool to detect deteriorations in motor planning and prediction in aged adults.

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Conseil Regional de Bourgogne and by the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM). P. Personnier was supported by grants from the Ministère de l’Education Nationale, de l’Enseignement et de la Recherche. We thank Elisabeth Thomas for valuable comments on the manuscript.

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Citation Excerpt :
Twenty healthy right-handed old adults (eight men; mean age, 74.5 ± 3.3 y; handedness uniform by chance) participated in both experiments of this study. The sample size was determined based on the previous studies of gait motor imagery in young and old adults [7,11–13]. For example, Personnier et al. [7] measured gait motor imagery for nine young and nine older adults.
Previous studies have shown that imagined walking ability decreases with age in a similar manner as actual walking ability; however, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying this aging effect. The present study investigates this issue, focusing on the effect of task difficulty and the involvement of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Twenty healthy right-handed older adults (mean age 74.5 ± 3.3 years) participated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, the time participants took for actual and imagined walking along a 5-m walkway of three different path widths (15, 25, and 50 cm) were compared. In Experiment 2, the participants imagined walking along the aforementioned paths while PFC activity was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. At the behavioral level, older adults exhibited longer mental and actual walking times for narrower paths and tended to overestimate their imagined walking times over their actual ones. However, overall, the magnitude of the overestimation did not differ by task difficulty. Regarding brain activity, older adults who overestimated mental walking times to a greater degree in the narrowest path exhibited decreased activation in the bilateral PFC. Moreover, compared with young adults in our previous study (Kotegawa et al., 2020), older adults with higher gait ability exhibited the same or smaller mental/actual walking times as well as decreased bilateral PFC activation in the most difficult condition. These results suggest that older adults, especially those with higher gait ability, can utilize neural mechanisms that are different from those of young adults when generating gait motor imagery.

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Temporal features of imagined locomotion in normal aging

Abstract

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

NeuroImage

Brain Res. Cogn. Brain Res.

Behav. Brain Res.

Behav. Brain Res.

Neuroimage

Neuron

Lancet

Clin. Geriatr. Med.

Neuropsychologia

Gait Posture

Brain Res. Rev.

Neurosci. Lett.

Behav. Brain Res.

Behav. Brain Res.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Curr. Opin. Neurobiol.