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Certain cognitive tasks, such as those involving inhibition, can influence an older adult’s dual-tasking ability more than others. This study aimed to manipulate cognitive task difficulty to evaluate age-associated differences in brain activity and behaviour during walking. Nineteen younger (M=21.3, SD=3.9) and 20 older (M=71.8, SD=6.4) adults completed four cognitive-auditory tasks: simple reaction time (SRT; processing speed), Go-no-Go (GNG; neural inhibition), N-back (NBK; working memory) and Double number sequence (DNS; working memory) with or without self-paced walking. Trials took place under single cognitive (SC), single motor (SM) and dual-task (walking with a cognitive task; DT) conditions. Throughout each condition, cerebral oxygenation changes (ΔHbO2) in the prefrontal cortex were acquired using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Behavioural measures including response time (ms), accuracy (%) and gait speed (m/s) were also calculated. Repeated measures ANOVAs revealed that OAs exhibited greater ΔHbO2 than YAs in the left hemisphere during the GNG inhibition task (p = 0.04). Activation in the right hemisphere also increased compared to the left during DNS DT (p = 0.05). Response times increased with increasing task difficulty and YAs were faster than OAs during NBK SC (p = 0.09). Neural findings revealed age-associated changes in prefrontal activation at the GNG inhibition difficulty level. Behavioural results indicated poorer performance with increasing task difficulty including slower response times in OAs. Moreover, gait speed and accuracy only decreased within task and difficulty. Therefore, understanding the neural and behavioural changes across task difficulty may help monitor cognitive decline and distinguish normal aging from disease states.

Background: Executive functions play a fundamental role in walking by integrating information from cognitive-motor pathways. Subtle changes in brain activation and behaviour may help identify older adults who are more susceptible to executive function deficits with advancing age due to prefrontal cortex deterioration. This study aims to examine how older adults mitigate executive demands while walking during cognitively demanding tasks.Methods: Twenty healthy older adults (M = 71.8 years, SD = 6.4) performed simple reaction time (SRT), go/no-go (GNG), n-back (NBK) and double number sequence (DNS) cognitive tasks of increasing difficulty while walking (i.e., dual-task). Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to measure the hemodynamic response (i.e., oxy- [HbO2] and deoxyhemoglobin [HbR]) changes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) during dual- and single-tasks (i.e., walking alone). In addition, performance was measured using gait speed (m/s), response time (s) and accuracy (% correct). Results: Using repeated measures ANOVAs, neural findings demonstrated a main effect of task such that ∆HbO2 (p = 0.047) and ∆HbR (p = 0.040) decreased between single- and dual-tasks. An interaction between task and cognitive difficulty (p = 0.014) revealed that gait speed decreased in the DNS between single- and dual-tasks. A main effect of task in response time indicated that the SRT response time was faster than all other difficulty levels (p < 0.001). Accuracy performance declined between single- and dual-tasks (p = 0.028) and across difficulty levels (p < 0.001) but were not significantly different between the NBK and DNS.Conclusion: Findings suggest that a healthy older adult sample might mitigate executive demands using an automatic locomotor control strategy such that shifting conscious attention away from walking during the dual-tasks resulted in decreased ∆HbO2 and ∆HbR. However, decreased prefrontal activation was inefficient at maintaining response time and accuracy performance and may be differently affected by increasing cognitive demands.

Older adults who pass standard cognitive tests but report subjective cognitive decline (SCD) may be identifying early changes in cognition at a stage when intervening can prevent further declines. Changes may be subtle highlighting the need for novel approaches, such as divided attention tasks, to distinguish between those with and without SCD. This pilot study examined 15 older women (9 SCD, 6 non-SCD) completing dual-task walking and tapping. Brain (cerebral oxygenation) and behavioural (gait and tap speed, accuracy, and vocal response) measures were assessed during single and dual-tasks. Older adults with SCD were marginally less accurate during dual-task tapping (p &lt; .06) and had greater cerebral oxygenation than the non-SCD group (p = .01). SCD did not moderate gait speed from single to dual-task while non-SCD did (p = .02). Findings suggest that challenging dual-task paradigms may help identify different behavioural and brain activity markers of SCD and intervention targets.

Introduction: Dual-task studies have demonstrated that walking is attention-demanding for younger adults. However, numerous studies have attributed this to task type rather than the amount of required to accomplish the task. This study examined four tasks: two discrete (i.e., short intervals of attention) and two continuous (i.e., sustained attention) to determine whether greater attentional demands result in greater dual-task costs due to an overloaded processing capacity.Methods: Nineteen young adults (21.5 ± 3.6 years, 13 females) completed simple reaction time (SRT) and go/no-go (GNG) discrete cognitive tasks and n-back (NBK) and double number sequence (DNS) continuous cognitive tasks with or without self-paced walking. Prefrontal cerebral hemodynamics were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and performance was measured using response time, accuracy, and gait speed.Results: Repeated measures ANOVAs revealed decreased accuracy with increasing cognitive demands (p = 0.001) and increased dual-task accuracy costs (p &lt; 0.001). Response times were faster during the single compared to dual-tasks during the SRT (p = 0.005) and NBK (p = 0.004). DNS gait speed was also slower in the dual compared to single task (p &lt; 0.001). Neural findings revealed marginally significant interactions between dual-task walking and walking alone in the DNS (p = 0.06) and dual -task walking compared to the NBK cognitive task alone (p = 0.05).Conclusion: Neural findings suggest a trend towards increased PFC activation during continuous tasks. Cognitive and motor measures revealed worse performance during the discrete compared to continuous tasks. Future studies should consider examining different attentional demands of motor tasks.