Article

Falls are the leading cause of injury-related deaths and hospitalizations, with
older adults at an increased risk. As humans age, physical changes and health
conditions make falls more likely. While we know how the body reflexively
responds to prevent injury during a fall, we know little about how people
perceive the fall itself. We previously found that young adults required a fall
to precede a comparison sound stimulus by approximately 44ms to perceive the two
events as simultaneous.
This may relate to common anecdotal reports suggesting
that humans often describe distortions in their perception of time - time seems
to slow down during a fall - with very little recollection of how and when the
fall began. Here we examine whether fall perception changes with age. Young
(19-25y) and older (61-72y) healthy adults made temporal order judgments
identifying whether the onset of their fall or the onset of a comparison sound
came first to measure the point of subjective simultaneity. Results show that
fall perception is nearly twice as slow for older adults, where perturbation
onset has to precede sound onset by approximately 88ms to appear coincident,
compared to younger adults ( approximately 44ms). We suggest that such
age-related differences in fall perception may relate to increased fall rates in
older adults. We conclude that a better understanding of how younger versus older
adults perceive falls may identify important factors for innovative fall
prevention strategies and rehabilitative training exercises to improve fall awareness.
CI - Copyright (c) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS