People worldwide live longer: for the first time in history, most people can expect to live into their sixties and beyond. Based on the WHO projections, the world’s population aged 60 years and beyond is expected to total 2 billion by 2050, more than twice as many in 2015.
Cognitive functioning is of great importance in older age. Preserving cognitive functioning delays care dependency and reverses physical frailty; it follows that understanding age-related cognitive decline and its neural mechanisms is a major topic of research in the domain of cognitive neuroscience.
Motor cognitive functions and their neurophysiology evolve and degrade along with the lifespan in a dramatic fashion. Current models of how the brain adapts to aging remain inspired primarily by studies on memory or language processes.
Yet, aging is strongly associated with reduced motor independence and the associated degraded interaction with the environment: accordingly, any neurocognitive model of aging not considering the motor system is, ipso facto, incomplete.
Here researchers present a meta-analysis of forty functional brain-imaging studies to address aging effects on motor control. Their results indicate that motor control is associated with aging-related changes in brain activity, involving not only motoric brain regions but also posterior areas such as the occipitotemporal cortex.
Notably, some of these differences depend on the specific nature of the motor task and the level of performance achieved by the participants. These findings support neurocognitive models of aging that make fewer anatomical assumptions while also considering tasks-dependent and performance-dependent manifestations.
Besides the theoretical implications, the present data also provide additional information for the motor rehabilitation domain, indicating that motor control is a more complex phenomenon than previously understood, to which separate cognitive operations can contribute and decrease in different ways with aging.
Published: 20 January 2022
source:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03027-2
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03027-2
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