Assessing cognitive interference on motor control
(2015) 11th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience — Location: (Belgium) Mons (22.May.2015)
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- Abstract
- Simultaneous execution of cognitive and sensorimotor tasks is critical in daily life. Here, we explored the recruitment of cognitive resources when performing a precision grip in 37 healthy participants (18 women/19 men), split in three equally sized age groups (18-30, 30-60 and 60-75 years). Participants performed a motor task in isolation (M), or in combination with a simple (M+CS) or difficult (M+DS) cognitive task. The motor task consisted in gripping, lifting and holding an instrumented apparatus with the dominant hand. In M+CS and M+DS, a list of letters was shown at trial onset. At trial offset, one letter was shown, and participants reported the following letter of the list. In M+CS, letters were a sequence of the alphabet. In M+DS, letters were in random order. Hence, only M+DS required maintaining information in working memory. Temporal and dynamic parameters of grip and lift forces were compared across conditions. In the dual tasks, there was a significant alteration of movement initiation and a significant increase of grip force, which was more pronounced in M+DS. There was no interaction with age and sex. Our results suggest that motor-cognitive dual tasks may constitute an ecologically-meaningful tool to evaluate motor function.
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Guillery, E., Mouraux, A., Thonnard, J.-L., & Legrain, V. (2015). Assessing cognitive interference on motor control. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 9. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/185384 (Original work published 2015)