Elderly adults delay proprioceptive reweighting during the anticipation of collision avoidance when standing

The ability to reweight visual and proprioceptive information is critical for maintaining postural stability in a dynamic environment. In this study, we examined whether visual anticipation of collision avoidance (AV) while standing could facilitate the down-weighting of altered proprioception in young and elderly adults. Twelve young (24.91±6.44years) and 12 elderly (74.8±6.42years) participants stood upright for 180s under two task conditions: (a) quiet stance (QS) and (b) standing while anticipating virtual objects to be avoided. In order to disrupt the accuracy of proprioceptive input participants were exposed to bilateral Achilles tendon vibration during the middle 60s of standing in both tasks. Visual field dependence was assessed using the Rod and Frame Test (RFT). Elderly demonstrated significantly higher visual field dependence compared to the young participants. Analysis of the normalized Root Mean Square (RMS) of the Center of Pressure velocity (dCoP) revealed that young participants immediately reduced the sway velocity variability induced by tendon vibration during the anticipation of collision AV compared to the QS task. In the elderly, however, the modulating influence of visual anticipation was delayed and became significant only in the last two time intervals of the vibration phase. These results suggest that volitionally shifting reliance on vision when anticipating a collision AV event facilitates the down-weighting of altered proprioception. Elderly adults seem to be unable to dynamically exploit visual anticipation in order to down weight the altered proprioception possibly as a result of their more permanent up-weighting of the visual modality. Sensory reweighting seems to be a more time consuming process in aging which may have important clinical implications for falling.