What is it about?
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. We used a shorter, gamified experimental task and collected data from participants in 5 age groups. 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.
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Photo by Daniel K Cheung on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our study is one of the first to test groups of kids, adults and older adults within the same paradigm. While other studies have sometimes found that visuomotor learning abilities are less proficient in children, or older adults, compared to younger adults, we found no differences in a number of visuomotor adaptation characteristics in a shorter, gamified paradigm.
Perspectives
It was a lot of fun to conduct a study at the local library, in my hometown of Innisfil. I ran a Neuroscience for Kids event at the library to recruit interest in the project and had some cool conversations with kids about the most awesome part of the human body - the brain.
Holly Clayton
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Visuomotor adaptation across the lifespan, PLoS ONE, July 2024, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0306276.
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