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Working Memory Training for Older Participants: A Control Group Training Regimen and Initial Intellectual Functioning Assessment
Published on: September 20, 2020
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Visually encoded working memory is closely associated with mobility in older adults
Toshikazu Kawagoe1, Kaoru Sekiyama
1Graduate School of Social & Cultural Sciences, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan, toshikazukawagoe@gmail.com.
Experimental Brain Research
|March 14, 2014
Summary
Older adults
Area of Science:
- Gerontology and Cognitive Neuroscience
- Investigating the interplay between aging, cognition, and motor function.
Background:
- Cognitive function, particularly executive function, is linked to motor performance in older adults.
- The specific relationship between different types of working memory (WM) and motor skills remains less understood.
- Age-related decline disproportionately affects face-based working memory compared to other visual stimuli.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine the association between diverse working memory (WM) types and motor performance (mobility and manual dexterity) in older adults.
- To investigate how aging impacts different forms of WM, specifically those involving numbers, locations, and faces.
- To determine if visually encoded WM is selectively associated with specific motor functions.
Main Methods:
- Utilized N-back tasks with number, location, and face stimuli to assess diverse working memory (WM) capacity.
- Measured mobility using the Timed Up and Go test and manual dexterity with the Pegboard Test.
- Analyzed data from community-dwelling older adults (mean age 78.6 years) using correlation and partial correlation analyses.
Main Results:
- Working memory for faces showed greater age-related decline than for numbers or locations.
- Working memory tasks demonstrated a stronger correlation with mobility than with manual dexterity in older adults.
- Spatial WM and face WM were significantly associated with mobility, even after controlling for age and general cognitive function.
Conclusions:
- Visually encoded working memory (WM) is selectively associated with mobility in older adults.
- General cognitive function is related to both mobility and manual dexterity.
- The findings suggest interactive processes between executive functions and perceptual encoding, potentially involving dynamic visual processing for locomotion.
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