Digital Natives and Dual Task: Handling It But Not Immune Against Cognitive-Locomotor Interferences

Abstract

Digital natives developed in an electronic dual tasking world. This paper addresses two questions. Do digital natives respond differently under a cognitive load realized during a locomotor task in a dual-tasking paradigm and how does this address the concept of safety? We investigate the interplay between cognitive (talking and solving Raven's matrices) and locomotor (walking on a treadmill) tasks in a sample of 17 graduate level participants. The costs of dual-tasking on gait were assessed by studying changes in stride interval time and its variability at long-range. A safety index was designed and computed from total relative change between the variability indices in the single walking and dual-task conditions. As expected, results indicate high Raven's scores with gait changes found between the dual task conditions compared to the single walking task. Greater changes are observed in the talking condition compared to solving Raven's matrices, resulting in high safety index values observed in 5 participants. We conclude that, although digital natives are efficient in performing the dual tasks when they are not emotional-based, modification of gait are observable. Due to the variation within participants and the observation of high safety index values in several of them, individuals that responded poorly to low cognitive loads should be encouraged to not perform dual task when executing a primate task of safety to themselves or others.

Added Value and Clinical Significance of Nonlinear Variability Indices of Walking Stride Interval in Neurodegenerative Diseases

“…It appears that the long-term SI pattern, during a walk for about ten minutes, is auto-correlated: the temporal characteristics of a step are strongly dependent on the temporal characteristics of the previous steps [3,4]. During the 1990s, Hausdorff and his collaborators [3,4] proposed a framework for analyzing temporal dynamics of walking SI over a consistent number of strides (above 500) which has since been successfully used in different physiological and pathological contexts such as performing a dual task during walking [5,6], studying aging process during walking [4,7,8], investigating the influence of Parkinson's disease [9][10][11] or peripheral neuropathy on walking [12].…”