Effects of motor fatigue on walking stability and variability during concurrent cognitive challenges

Cognitive-motor interference, a negative influence on the performance of one or both tasks, is manifested when simultaneously performing a cognitive and a motor task. Motor fatigue reduces the ability of generating a required force level. However, little is known about the effects of motor fatigue on the cognitive-motor dual-tasking performance, an important capability during our daily lives. This study investigated how motor fatigue affects dual-task walking performance. Eighteen healthy younger adults walked on a treadmill under three different conditions: walking only, walking while receiving the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT) or a modified Stroop test before and after a lower-extremity fatiguing exercise. We computed dynamic margins of stability (MOS), step and joint kinematic variability, and short-term local divergence exponent (LDE) of the trunk motion. We found that subjects had similar values of short-term LDE during all conditions, indicating that local stability was not affected by the motor fatigue or dual-task conditions. Compared to the baseline, subjects had significantly greater mean MOS after the fatiguing exercise by walking with greater step length and width while having significantly greater gait variability. In contrast, subjects walked with similar mean MOS but significantly less gait variability during the dual-task conditions, indicating that subjects used different adaptive strategies when walking with motor fatigue and during dual-task conditions. There were no significant differences in the number of errors for the two cognitive tests before and after the fatiguing exercise. The current findings demonstrate that motor fatigue does not affect cognitive but motor performance in younger adults.