Ageing is associated with declines in mobility and balance that threaten independence and increase fall risk. These changes are multifactorial, resulting from interactions among peripheral, multisensory, and central nervous system processes. Among these factors, altered cognitive control plays an important role in contributing to postural instability and gait impairments.
Here, we examined whether shifts in cognitive control strategy underlie impaired gait initiation in older adults by modelling how individuals update beliefs about upcoming actions. Older and younger adults performed a choice-stepping go/no-go task in which step likelihood was manipulated across trials. We measured anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs), the preparatory weight shifts preceding stepping and modelled age-related differences in APA onset using a hierarchical Bayesian framework.
Older adults initiated slower APAs, particularly after repeated go trials. Computational modelling revealed reduced learning rates and heightened sensitivity to uncertainty in older adults, identifying altered belief updating as a cognitive mechanism shaping age-related changes in adaptive stepping. We would like to thank Li-Juan Jie, Chloé Calis, Helge Monien, Floor Kaalberg, Allanah Smith, Pien Alferink, Jeannette Boschma and Penelope Edwins for their assistance with data acquisition, and Johan Gielissen and Paul Willems for technical support.
This study was financially supported by the European Union through the Marie-Curie Actions (895914) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO, 406.22.GO.045). Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands Alan Bince Jacob, Sonja A. Kotz, Ryszard Auksztulewicz, Markus Köpcke & Tjeerd W.
Boonstra Department of Nutrition and Movement Sciences, NUTRIM Institute for Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
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