The cognitive complexity of concurrent cognitive-motor tasks reveals age-related deficits in motor performance

Aging reduces cognitive functions, and such impairments have implications in mental and motor performance. Cognitive function has been recently linked to the risk of falls in older adults. Physical activities have been used to attenuate the declines in cognitive functions and reduce fall incidence, but little is known whether a physically active lifestyle can maintain physical performance under cognitively demanding conditions. The aim of this study was to verify whether physically active older adults present similar performance deficits during upper limb response time and precision stepping walking tasks when compared to younger adults. Both upper limb and walking tasks involved simple and complex cognitive demands through decision-making. For both tasks, decision-making was assessed by including a distracting factor to the execution. The results showed that older adults were substantially slower than younger individuals in the response time tasks involving decision-making. Similarly, older adults walked slower and extended the double support periods when precision stepping involved decision-making. These results suggest that physically active older adults present greater influence of cognitive demanding contexts to perform a motor task when compared to younger adults. These results underpin the need to develop interventions combining cognitive and motor contexts.