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Effects of aging on temporal predictive mechanisms of speech and hand motor reaction time

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Abstract

Evidence from previous studies has suggested that movement execution in younger adults is accelerated in response to temporally predictable vs. unpredictable sensory stimuli. This effect indicates that external temporal information can modulate motor behavior; however, how aging can influence temporal predictive mechanisms in motor system has yet to be understood. The objective of the present study was to investigate aging effects on the initiation and inhibition of speech and hand movement reaction times in response to temporally predictable and unpredictable sensory stimuli. Fifteen younger (mean age 22.6) and fifteen older (mean age 63.8) adults performed a randomized speech vowel vocalization or button press initiation and inhibition tasks in two counterbalanced blocks in response to temporally predictable and unpredictable visual cue stimuli. Results showed that motor reaction time was accelerated in both younger and older adults for predictable vs. unpredictable stimuli during initiation and inhibition of speech and hand movement. However, older adults were significantly slower than younger adults in motor execution of speech and hand movement when stimulus timing was unpredictable. Moreover, we found that overall, motor inhibition of speech and hand was executed faster than their initiation. Our findings suggest that older adults can compensate age-related decline in motor reaction times by incorporating external temporal information and execute faster movement in response to predictable stimuli, whereas unpredictable temporal information cannot counteract aging effects efficiently and lead to less accurate motor timing predictive codes for speech production and hand movement.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Drs. Chris Rorden and Allen Montgomery for their feedback on this manuscript. This research was supported by a Grant from the NIH/NIDCD, Grant number: K01-DC015831-01A1 (PI: Behroozmand), and by the Graduate Scholar Award for Aging Research received by Karim Johari from the University of South Carolina.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Speech Neuroscience Lab, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Carolina, 915 Greene Street, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Karim Johari & Roozbeh Behroozmand

  2. The Neurolinguistics Lab, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Carolina, 915 Greene Street, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Dirk-Bart den Ouden

Authors
  1. Karim Johari
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  2. Dirk-Bart den Ouden
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  3. Roozbeh Behroozmand
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Contributions

RB designed the research and KJ collected data for the experiments. KJ and RB analyzed the collected data. KJ, RB, and DO interpreted the results and wrote the manuscript and all authors reviewed and approved the final draft.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Roozbeh Behroozmand.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest. No commercial party having a direct financial interest in the results of the research supporting this article has or will confer a benefit on the author(s) or on any organization with which the author(s) is/are associated.

Statement of human and animal rights

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Johari, K., den Ouden, DB. & Behroozmand, R. Effects of aging on temporal predictive mechanisms of speech and hand motor reaction time. Aging Clin Exp Res 30, 1195–1202 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-018-0902-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-018-0902-4

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