Humans perform movements in the face of uncertainty on a daily basis. To accomplish these tasks without error, young adults frequently rely on feedback-mediated motor strategies that allow them to update their movement as uncertainty evolves. However, it remains unclear how aging impacts the ability to plan and execute movement under uncertain conditions.
Here we use a “go-before-you-know” pointing task completed during functional neuroimaging to examine how aging influences movement planning under uncertainty. Behaviorally, young adults employed a strategy consistent with feedback-mediated control, biasing their trajectories toward the more likely target when uncertainty was low, and intermediate to potential targets when uncertainty was high. Older adults employed a different approach, shifting away from an intermediate reaching strategy, particularly under high uncertainty, suggesting a shift toward feedforward control.
Neuroimaging mirrored these behavioral patterns, revealing that young adults encoded task uncertainty and movement direction in sensorimotor regions more strongly than older adults. Overall, these findings suggest that aging diminishes the ability to flexibly encode task-related uncertainty, leading to a shift towards feedforward control strategies. This work was supported by the Oregon Medical Research Foundation (M.M.).
Department of Human Physiology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA Nicholas Kreter, Catherine Sager & Michelle Marneweck Department of Kinesiology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA Departments of Kinesiology and Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK Department of Psychology, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL, USA Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, Eugene, OR, USA The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.
You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Kreter, N., Sager, C., Barany, D.A. et al. Age-related shift towards feedforward motor control under uncertainty.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
