In a visual inverted pendulum balancing task avoiding impending falls gets harder as we age

Younger adults (YA) and older adults (OA) used a joystick to stabilize an unstable visual inverted pendulum (VIP) with a fundamental frequency (.27 Hz) of half that of bipedal human sway. Their task was to keep the VIP upright and to avoid ± 60° "fall" boundaries. Both age groups were tested with joystick gains and delays simulating age-related muscle strength and reflex slowing, respectively. In previous VIP and analogous self-balancing tasks, we observed a mixture of discrete corrective commands toward the balance point and destabilizing commands toward an impending fall. We hypothesized that (1) OA would fall more than YA, (2) traditional whole-trial stability and variability measures would differ across age groups and VIP conditions, and (3) different dynamics of corrective and destabilizing commands would discriminate falling from recovery. Results: (i) Traditional whole-trial performance metrics of fall incidence and the variance of position and velocity were worse in OA than YA and worse with longer delays and excessive joystick gains; (ii) OA made fewer corrective and more destabilizing commands than YA only when falling was imminent; (iii) when falls were imminent, a logistic model fit the percentage of inactive, corrective, and destabilizing commands as a function of time left to fall; and (iv) OA were like YA in switching between inaction and action, but exhibited less frequent and less prompt corrective commands than destabilizing commands relative to YA. We discuss whether such a decision-like process may also operate in a bipedal stance.