Article

During walking, attention needs to be flexibly allocated to deal with varying
environmental constraints. This ability may be affected by aging and lower
overall executive function. The present study examined the influence of aging and
executive function on the attentional costs of visually guided walking under
different task demands. Three groups, young adults (n=15) and elderly adults with
higher (n=16) and lower (n=10) executive function, walked on a treadmill in three
conditions: uncued walking and walking with regular and irregular patterns of
visual stepping targets projected onto the belt. Attentional costs were assessed
using a secondary probe reaction time task and corrected by subtracting baseline
single-task reaction time, yielding an estimate of the additional attentional
costs of each walking condition. We found that uncued walking was more
attentionally demanding for elderly than for young participants. In young
participants, the attentional costs increased significantly from uncued to
regularly cued to irregularly cued walking, whereas for the higher executive
function group, attentional costs only increased significantly from regularly
cued to irregularly cued walking. For the group with lower executive function, no
significant differences were observed. The observed decreased flexibility of
elderly, especially those with lower executive function, to allocate additional
attentional resources to more challenging walking conditions may be attributed to
the already increased attentional costs of uncued walking, presumably required
for visuomotor and/or balance control of walking.
CI - Copyright (c) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS