Both age and physical activity level impact on eye-hand coordination

Abstract

Aging impacts on our ability to perform goal-directed aiming movements. Older adults generally make slower and shorter initial impulses towards the end target, and therefore require more time for corrections in the final movement stage. Recent studies however suggest that a physically active lifestyle may attenuate these age-related changes. Also, it remains unclear whether eye-movement control exhibits a similar pattern of adaptation in older adults. Therefore, the first aim of this study was to describe how age and physical activity level impact eye-hand coordination during discrete manual aiming. Young and older participants were divided into physically active and sedentary subgroups, and performed discrete aiming movements while hand and eye movements were recorded. Secondly, to determine whether older adults depend more on vision during aiming, the task was repeated without visual feedback. The results revealed that the typical age-related hand movement adaptations were not only observed in older, but also in sedentary young participants. Older and sedentary young participants also spent more hand movement time after the eyes fixated the end target. This finding does not necessarily reflect an augmented reliance on vision, as all groups showed similar aiming errors when visual feedback was removed. In conclusion, both age and physical activity level clearly impacted eye-hand coordination during discrete manual aiming. This adapted coordination pattern seems to be caused by other factors than an increased reliance on vision.

Manual aiming in healthy aging: does proprioceptive acuity make the difference?

“…All in all, our findings from experiment 1 are consistent with the large body of research on manual aiming and aging, showing that older adults can achieve similar levels of endpoint accuracy as their younger peers (e.g., Lyons et al 1996;Van Halewyck et al 2014).…”

“…Although these movement adaptations are usually interpreted as an increased reliance on visual feedback in older age (Coats and Wann 2011;Rand and Stelmach 2011;Terrier et al 2011), our data are inconsistent with this hypothesis again (see also Van Halewyck et al 2014). The finding that older adults were not affected to a greater extent by the removal of online as well as offline visual feedback suggests that they were not more dependent on vision during the goaldirected aiming task as compared to their younger peers.…”

“…However, careful inspection of our data seems to negate this argument. First, when visual feedback was withdrawn, young and older adults achieved similar levels of endpoint accuracy (see also Van Halewyck et al 2014). Moreover, aiming strategy adapted upon the removal of online visual feedback did not change dramatically across the four groups, suggesting that the same strategy was applied irrespective of their age and physical activity level.…”

“…Specifically, there was no evidence to show that the withdrawal of visual feedback increased aiming errors in the non-active older adults more than in the other three groups, even though the proprioceptive ability of this group was, generally, inferior (negating hypothesis 3). Those seemingly contradicting outcomes require further attention because main body of findings from both experiments are consisted with a vast body of literature on effects of physical activity and aging on manual aiming (e.g., Chaput and Proteau 1996;Lyons et al 1996;Seidler-Dobrin and Stelmach 1998;Van Halewyck et al 2014) and proprioception (e.g., Adamo et al 2007;Adamo et al 2009;Herter et al 2014;Wright et al 2011). The specific effects of age and physical activity level on manual aiming and proprioception as emerged in findings of experiment 1 and experiment 2 are discussed in more details next.…”

Whole Part or Mini Games, which one is the most effective training method to improve forearm passing ability in volleyball?

“…People who have different ages and who perform physical activity on different levels influence their handeye coordination. So the pattern of coordination seems to be caused by many factors [21].…”