Effects of aging on automatic and effortful processes in bimanual coordination.

Two experiments are reported that compared younger and older adults on their performance of two bimanual temporal coordination tasks at varying movement speeds. In many cases, older adults performed as well as younger adults at all speeds of an in-phase coordination pattern and at slow speeds of an anti-phase pattern for both coordination accuracy and stability. Age differences tended to emerge most prominently at high speeds for the anti-phase pattern. These findings are consistent with the aging literature regarding automatic and effortful processing distinctions, suggesting that relative age differences become magnified when effortful resources are required for motor performance.

Effects of aging and reduced relative frequency of knowledge of results on learning a motor skill.

Although there is evidence for age-related changes in both cognition and motor control, very little is known about the effect of age on learning of new motor skills. The present experiment addressed the interaction between aging and the role of knowledge of results (KR) on a motor learning task. Using a three-segment task on which each segment had specific timing goals, three different manipulations of relative frequency of information about performance were compared in younger and older adults. The three conditions were (a) 100% KR in which information about performance on each segment was provided after every trial, (b) 67% KR in which the performance information was faded over trials, and (c) 67% KR in which the performance information was faded over the segments within each trial. Following 90 acquisition trials, all subjects performed retention, transfer, and reacquisition tests. There were age-related differences for movement accuracy and consistency on acquisition and on the retention tests but not on the transfer test. However, none of these differences interacted with the frequency of KR manipulations. Surprisingly, there was no effect due to the fading schedules of KR. In general, these results indicated that younger and older adults use KR in a similar way to learn a motor skill.