Neural and Gait Adaptations to Dual-Task Demands in Children and Young Adults: A Mobile Brain-Body Imaging (MoBI) Study.
Cognitive-motor interactions describe the complex interplay underlying how the brain manages concurrent demands on motor and cognitive processing. Yet, how cognitive-motor interactions present across childhood and young adulthood remains understudied, particularly through multi-modal methods which include neurophysiology. We investigated development of cognitive-motor interactions using a…
The study titled "Neural and Gait Adaptations to Dual-Task Demands in Children and Young Adults: A Mobile Brain-Body Imaging (MoBI) Study" explores the complex relationship between cognitive and motor processing in individuals of different ages. Researchers aimed to understand how cognitive-motor interactions change as individuals grow from childhood to young adulthood through a dual-task study design.
The study employed a dual-task approach, combining a visual Go-NoGo task with a walking activity on a treadmill. In total, 61 neurotypical participants aged between 8 and 30 years old took part in the research. Simultaneously, researchers recorded each participant's EEG (electroencephalography), gait kinematics, and task performance using mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI).
As participants aged, they demonstrated improvements in task accuracy and speed. Additionally, their walking became less variable, and the N200 and P300 ERP (event-related potential) amplitudes increased. Two key effects of cognitive-motor interactions emerged with age. Firstly, older participants showed a reduction in N200 amplitude while walking, indicating a greater reliance on neurophysiological flexibility to maintain task performance.
This suggests that older individuals may need to engage more adaptive neural mechanisms to support their cognitive demands during dual-task walking. Conversely, younger children exhibited less efficient performance and might not have necessitated the same level of adaptive neural mechanisms. Secondly, the study found that stride variability during dual-task walking decreased with age, indicating that motor development becomes increasingly robust when carrying out dual tasks.
These findings indicate a distinct pattern of changes in cognitive-motor interactions throughout development. By examining these patterns, future research can explore how this pattern varies in different developmental conditions.
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