Adaptation and Strategy in Visuomotor Rotations in Younger and Older Adults

Abstract

This study looked at internal adaptation and explicit strategy use during a visuomotor rotation task in two different age groups: younger adults and older adults. The aim of this study was to see how motor skill learning, specifically explicit strategy use, might be affected by aging. The visuomotor rotation task used in this study was manipulated to increase the difficulty of determining the correct strategy by changing landmarks from which strategy was inferred. Overall, we found that explicit strategy, but not implicit adaptation, was impaired in the older aged participants, and that these impairments were exaggerated in the more difficult landmark condition. We propose that our findings may suggest that older adults are more impaired in goaldirected strategy use as compared to habitual strategy use.