Enriched childhood experiences moderate age-related motor and cognitive decline

Abstract

Aging is associated with deterioration of skilled manual movement. Specifically, aging corresponds with increased reaction time, greater movement duration, segmentation of movement, increased movement variability, and reduced ability to adapt to external forces and inhibit previously learned sequences. Moreover, it is thought that decreased lateralization of neural function in older adults may point to increased neural recruitment as a compensatory response to deterioration of key frontal and intra-hemispheric networks, particularly of callosal structures. However, factors that mediate age-related motor decline are not well understood. Here we show that music training in childhood is associated with reduced age-related decline of bimanual and unimanual motor skills in a MIDI keyboard motor learning task. Compared to older adults without music training, older adults with more than a year of music training demonstrated proficient bimanual and unimanual movement, evidenced by enhanced speed and decreased movement errors. Further, this group demonstrated significantly better implicit learning in the weather prediction task, a non-motor task. The performance of older adults with music training in those tasks was comparable to young adults. Older adults, however, displayed greater verbal ability compared to young adults irrespective of a past history of music training. Our results indicate that music training early in life may reduce age-associated decline of neural motor and cognitive networks.

The effects of musical training on movement pre-programming and re-programming abilities: An event-related potential investigation

“…This finding fits with a number of previous reports suggesting a link between musical training and response speed (e.g. expert musicians: Amer et al, 2013;older adults;Khemthong et al, 2012;Amer et al, 2013;Metzler et al, 2013;amateur musicians: Hughes & Franz, 2007;Jentzsch et al, 2014). Importantly, despite these general group differences, musicians did not differ from non-musicians in their ability to selectively prepare a forthcoming movement using pre-specified movement information or to re-program in incorrectly pre-specified motor plan.…”

Savoring the Past: Positive Memories Evoke Value Representations in the Striatum

“…optimism) or engaging in active coping mechanisms (e.g. humor, mindfulness; Wu et al, 2013) – a process that has been associated with striatum function during aversive learning (Delgado et al, 2009; Ledoux and Gorman, 2001). We observed that participants with higher self-reported resiliency (Connor-Davidson Resiliency scale; Connor and Davidson, 2003) exhibited greater activity in the right caudate ROI – defined by the contrast of positive and neutral memory recall – during the recall of positive autobiographical memories (correlation between resilience scores and parameter estimates from the right caudate ROI: r(19) = 0.458, p = .05).…”

How Do Children Perceive and Act on Dynamic Affordances in Crossing Traffic‐Filled Roads?

“…Actions that are possible at one moment may not be possible a short time later. We consider these time-varying possibilities for action as dynamic affordances (see also Fajen, 2013). This contrasts with static affordances in which the timing of movement has no impact on either judging or acting on the affordance (e.g., judging the reachability of an object on a shelf).…”