The Effects Of Cognitive And Perceptual Load - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Final, sorry: The Effects Of Cognitive And Perceptual Load

Background: The ageing process may degrade an individual's balance control, hearing capacity, and cognitive function.

Brief Research Report ARTICLE

Older adults perform click on simultaneously executed balance and secondary tasks i. Aim: The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of passive listening on functional gait in healthy older vs. Methods: Twenty young and 20 older healthy adults were recruited. Functional gait Functional Gait Assessment in silent and noisy Egfectshearing function audiogram; Speech in Babble testand cognitive ability Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery were measured. Results: Overall, a significant difference between functional gait performance in silent vs.

Correlations were found between increasing age, worse functional gait performance, poorer hearing capacity and lower performance on cognitive function tasks. Interestingly, worse performance on attention tasks appeared to be associated with a worse functional gait performance in the noisy condition.

Participants and Methods

Conclusion: Passive listening to multi-talker babble noise can affect functional gait in both young and older adults. This effect could result from the cognitive load of the babble noise, due to the engagement of attention networks by the unattended speech.

Balance control is not just an automatic process but also a perceptual motor task that requires cognitive function, especially attention 1. Ageing can be associated with a decline in balance, hearing, and cognitive function. Age-related changes in pathways that underpin Pecreptual control may lead to balance impairment or increased falls risk 2. There is, also, evidence that both age-related hearing loss [ 3 for a review 4 ] and age-related cognitive decline [ 56 for a review 7 ] increase these risks. Furthermore, hearing loss is a potential risk factor for cognitive deficits in older adults [ 8 for a review 9 ].

Other Potential Effects

In particular attention, working memory and executive function seem to be impaired in individuals with hearing loss [ 9 for a review]. It is suggested that an inability to allocate attention could be an important factor contributing to balance constraints during gait in fallers Older adults in particular need more attentional resources to keep their postural The Effects Of Cognitive And Perceptual Load 1011especially when multitasking If the attention capacity is exceeded when performing two tasks together, a dual-task interference effect will be seen, i.

There are several studies assessing dual-task effects on dynamic balance performance. Bruce and colleagues examined dual-task costs i. There was no effect of auditory challenge on postural measures for either young or old adults, as well as old adults with age-related hearing loss An earlier study by Springer et al. Gait was evaluated as a single task and under three different dual-task conditions i. The performance of the tasks that required attention had a destabilising effect on the postural control of older fallers.

However, they failed to find an age-associated increase in the dual-task effect on gait variability between non-fallers and young adults. Notably, all three groups showed a reduction in gait speed during all three dual-tasking conditions. Young adults possibly decreased their gait speed to remain stable, while older non-fallers decreased their speed and swing times In another study, young adults and The Effects Of Cognitive And Perceptual Load adults had to listen to and report key words from a target sentence while walking.

The researchers reported that walking required more cognitive resources for older than for younger adults, and proposed that effortful listening in elderly resulted in a competition for cognitive capacity required for walking Passive listening tasks might be particularly relevant to investigate since we live in a very noisy world This may click especially interesting in older adults, as various neuroimaging studies have indicated link vulnerability to auditory distraction 18 Stevens and colleagues found that the noisy fMRI environment induced an age-related distraction effect that was attributed to a misallocation of attention to the distracting sound, leading to failure of the performance of the initial visual task The first aim of this study was to investigate the effect of passive auditory distraction on functional gait in older vs.

We used the standard Functional Gait Assessment FGA 20 and an auditory FGA protocol with an informational type two-talker babble noise masker in a passive listening task for this purpose. Secondary aims were to investigate the relationship between age, hearing capacity, cognitive function predominantly visual attention allocation and the individual's functional gait performance in standard and noisy conditions. It was hypothesised that 1 exposure to babble noise would degrade FGA performance in both groups; 2 FGA performance in babble noise conditions would be worse in older compared to younger adults; 3 increasing age, poorer hearing ability and lower The Effects Of Cognitive And Perceptual Load on cognitive function tasks would be correlated with worse FGA measures. All participants were screened for compliance with inclusion criteria using a participant-screening questionnaire.]