Presbypropria: the effects of physiological ageing on proprioceptive control

Abstract

Several changes in the human sensory systems, like presbycusis or presbyopia, are wellknown to occur with physiological ageing. A similar change is likely to occur in proprioception, too, but there are strong and unexplained discrepancies in the literature. It was proposed that assessment of the attentional cost of proprioceptive control could provide information able to unify these previous studies. To this aim, 15 young adults and 15 older adults performed a position matching task in single and dual-task paradigms with different difficulty levels of the secondary task (congruent and incongruent Stroop-type tasks) to assess presumed age-related deficits in proprioceptive control. Results showed that proprioceptive control was as accurate and as consistent in older as in young adults for a single proprioceptive task. However, performing a secondary cognitive task and increasing the difficulty of this secondary task evidenced both a decreased matching performance and/or an increased attentional cost of proprioceptive control in older adults as compared to young ones. These results advocated for an impaired proprioception in physiological ageing.

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

“…Taken together, observations from experiment 2 suggest that active older adults may delay their natural decline in proprioception by more effective activation of brain networks associated with sensory processing and cognitive control (Nagamatsu et al 2012;Smith et al 2011;VoelckerRehage et al 2011;see review Voelcker-Rehage and Niemann 2013). This hypothesis is consistent with observations from recent studies showing that age-related declines in proprioception of the lower limb may particularly be visible in challenging conditions that demand more attention (Boisgontier et al 2012;Boisgontier and Nougier 2013;see review Boisgontier et al 2013). Future research may investigate the hypothesis by adding conditions without visual feedback in which aiming movements with high accuracy and/or attentional demands are executed under a strict time constraint.…”

Ageing of internal models: from a continuous to an intermittent proprioceptive control of movement

“…The splitting of the total error into variable and constant errors showed that this decrease in the overall end-point performance was mainly related to the constant error, evidencing an overshooting behaviour in the older adults as compared to the young ones. This result supported the study of Boisgontier et al (2012) which showed that older adults overshot the proprioceptive target when the cognitive load increased. Together, these results suggested that when they have to deal with a stressor (temporal or cognitive) in a proprioceptive task, older adults overshoot rather than undershoot the target.…”

“…This absence of significant age-related difference supported previous studies showing that older adults were able to reach levels of proprioceptive control performance comparable to those observed in young adults (Batavia et al 1999;Boisgontier et al 2012;Deshpande et al 2003;Goble et al 2012a, b;Marks 1996;Pickard et al 2003). The splitting of the total error into variable and constant errors confirmed this similar pattern of end-point results between age groups.…”

“…Furthermore, the literature suggests that presenting the reference limb for an extended period of time to older adults enabled them to reach a performance of proprioceptive control similar to the young adults' one. Indeed, three of the studies which assessed the proprioceptive control of movement of young and older adults in a contralateral concurrent matching task showed that older adults exhibited greater absolute errors than young ones (Adamo et al 2007(Adamo et al , 2009Meeuwsen et al 1993), whereas the other study did not evidence significant errors between young and older adults (Boisgontier et al 2012). The only difference between the first three studies and the last one was the time spent in the reference position.…”

“…It was hypothesised that (1) the ability to accurately match the proprioceptive target in the self-selected speed condition was not different between young and older adults. Indeed, although it was against an increased cognitive cost and additional neural resources, previous studies showed that older adults were able to reach levels of proprioceptive control of movement comparable to those of young adults (Batavia et al 1999;Boisgontier et al 2012;Deshpande et al 2003;Goble et al 2012a, b;Heuninckx et al 2008;Marks 1996;Pickard et al 2003). However, on the basis of the differences observed in motor imagery (Personnier et al 2010(Personnier et al , 2008Skoura et al 2005) and kinematic studies (Elliott and Hansen 2010;Goggin and Meeuwsen 1992;ReyRobert et al 2012; Seidler-Dobrin and Stelmach 1998), we hypothesised that (2) older adults were not able to reach the same level of end-point performance as the young adults in the fast speed condition due to the temporal constraints, making it impossible to use additional sub-movements to compensate for the presumably altered internal models.…”