The influence of age and age simulation on task-difficulty choices in motor tasks

ABSTRACT

    Having a realistic perception of one’s motor abilities is important for successful aging. We used two different motor tasks, carrying a tray with cube-towers (study 1; n = 20 young adults; n = 20 older adults), and stepping over a crossbar (study 2; n = 23 young adults; n = 21 older adults), to investigate how physical risk influences task-difficulty choices. We also investigated the effect of wearing an age simulation suit on young adults. For the tray-carrying task, older adults were more risk-tolerant in their task-difficulty choices. When stepping over the crossbar, older adults left a larger “safety-buffer” than young adults. When wearing the age suit, young adults adopted a more careful strategy in the stepping task. We conclude that healthy older adults flexibly adjust their strategies to postural risks, and that young adults’ strategy-choices can be influenced by experimentally inducing some of the sensory-motor constraints of old age.

KEYWORDS:

• Age simulation
• motor performance
• aging
• risk taking
• task-difficulty choices

Author Note

There was no prior dissemination of the ideas and data appearing in the manuscript at conferences or on the internet.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Nicolas Jacobson for his help with data collection, and Gianluca Amico, Christian Kaczmarek, Peter Leinen, Stefan Panzer, Fabian Pelzer, and Dirk Wentura for helpful discussions. We also want to thank our participants for taking part in the study, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Please note missing values for 3 (height) and 4 (weight) older adults.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Saarland University.