Mentally represented motor actions in normal aging I. Age effects on the temporal features of overt and covert execution of actions

The present study examines the temporal features of overt and covert actions as a function of normal aging. In the first experiment, we tested three motor tasks (walking, sit-stand-sit, arm pointing) that did not imply any particular spatiotemporal constraints, and we compared the duration of their overt and covert execution in three different groups of age (mean ages: 22.5, 66.2 and 73.4 years). We found that the ability of generating motor images did not differentiate elderly subjects from young subjects. Precisely, regarding overt and covert durations, subjects presented similarities for the walking and pointing tasks and dissimilarities for the stand-sit-stand task. Furthermore, the timing variability of imagined movements was always greater compared to actual movements and was of the same amount in the three groups of age. In the second experiment, we investigated the effect of age (three groups with mean ages: 22, 64.8 and 73.2 years) upon temporal characteristics of covert and overt movements involving strong spatiotemporal constraints (speed/accuracy trade-off paradigm). During overt execution young and elderly subjects respected Fitts’s law despite the fact that movement speed progressively decreased with age. Thus, while execution is deteriorated, the motor preparation process is still intact in old age, and follows well-known laws of biological motions. For covert execution, movement speed progressively decreased with age but elderly subjects did not respect Fitts’s law. This suggests that the generation and control of motor intentions that consciously do not come to execution, particularly those concerning complex motor actions are progressively perturbed in the aging brain.