Postural control and attentional demand during adolescence

Abstract

In the present study we aimed to determine the attentional cost of postural control during adolescence by studying the influence of a cognitive task on concurrent postural control. 38 teenagers aged 12 to 17 years and 13 young adults (mean age = 26.1) stood barefoot on a force platform in a semi-tandem position. A dual-task paradigm consisted of performing a Stroop or a COUNTING BACKWARD task while simultaneously standing quietly on a firm or foam support surface. Different centre of pressure (CoP) measures were calculated (90% confidence ellipse area, mean velocity, root mean square on the antero-posterior (AP) and medio-lateral (ML) axes). The number and percentage of correct responses in the cognitive tasks were also recorded. Our results indicate (1) higher values of surface, ML mean velocity and ML RMS in the COUNTING BACKWARD task in adolescents aged 12 to 15 than in teenagers aged 16 to 17 and in adults, regardless of the complexity of the postural task and, (2) better cognitive performances in the Stroop than in the COUNTING BACKWARD task. The difference in the dual-task performance between the different age groups and particularly the existence of a turning point around 14-15 years of age might be due to 1) difficulties in properly allocating attentional resources to two simultaneous tasks and/or, 2) the inability to manage increased cognitive requests because of a limited information processing capacity in adolescents aged 14-15 years. IntroductionAlthough it has often been argued that undisturbed quiet standing is automatically regulated, several studies using dual-task paradigms demonstrated a clear link between the regulation of sway and higher-order processes (Lajoie et al., 1993). Even in young adults, a minimum amount of attention is required to stand upright. The more challenging the postural task (e.g., feet-together or unipedal stance), the greater the required attentional resources (Dault et al., 2001). Cognitive (e.g., reading, counting backward, and spelling words) and postural tasks (e.g., upright stance and one-leg balance) require common cognitive mechanisms that involve a conflicting relationship when both tasks are performed simultaneously (Kerr et al., 1985). Increasing the level of difficulty of the cognitive task involves either increased (Blanchard et al., 2005), decreased (Andersson et al., 2002) or unchanged (Kerr et al., 1985) centre of foot pressure (CoP) excursions. Conversely, the performance of the cognitive task (e.g., backward counting and reaction-time task) can be compromised by a simultaneous control of quiet stance in adults with calf vibration (Andersson et al., 2002), on a beam (Barra et al., 2006) or with suppression or perturbation of sensory information in the elderly . The

Possibility of Using Entropy Method to Evaluate the Distracting Effect of Mobile Phones on Pedestrians

“…Previous studies have extensively evaluated various kinds of secondary tasks such as cognitive load [26][27][28][29][30][31][32], physical load [33][34][35], visual load [32,33,[36][37][38], and auditory load [36,39,40].…”

Attentional Demands Associated With Postural Control Depend on Task Difficulty and Visual Condition

“…Therefore, when the level of difficulty of the postural task increases, Attentional Demands and Postural Task Difficulty the attentional resources allocated to postural control would also increase. A number of studies reported that in a dual task condition, postural steadiness can decrease concurrently or not with the performance of a secondary task in adolescents (Palluel et al, 2010), in young adults (Andersson et al, 1998;Pellecchia, 2003) and in elderly individuals (Shumway-Cook & Woollacott, 2000). The cross-domain competition model (Lacour et al, 2008) can account for this dual task interference.…”

“…It could be argued that compared with more complex cognitive tasks used in the literature, such as counting backwards (Brown, Shumway-Cook, & Woollacott, 1999;Palluel et al, 2010), performing Stroop tasks (Dault, Geurts, et al, 2001;Palluel et al, 2010) or arithmetic tasks (Vuillerme & Vincent, 2006;Weeks, Forget, Mouchnino, Gravel, & Bourbonnais, 2003), the use of a simple RT task as a secondary task did not require a high level of attention. Nevertheless, the performance of a simple RT task has the advantage of being measurable with a single variable compared with usually two parameters (i.e., the percentage of correct answers and the total number of answers) for more complex cognitive tasks.…”

“…These authors hypothesized that the addition of a secondary cognitive task may increase the stiffness of postural muscles and lead to a tighter control of postural sway (Carpenter, Frank, Silcher, & Peysar, 2001;Winter, Patla, Prince, Ishac, & Gielo-Perczak, 1998), or could allow the subjects to focus more attention on the secondary task, delegating postural control to more automatic processes. Furthermore, other researchers have also found that postural sway can increase with the addition of a cognitive task (Andersson et al, 1998;Palluel, Nougier, & Olivier, 2010;Pellecchia, 2003). For example, Pellecchia (2003) investigated postural control when subjects stood on both legs with eyes opened on a foam surface while concurrently counting backward by three.…”

The Effect of Performing a Dual Task on Postural Control in Children with Autism

“…Postural control has been considered to be an automatic system [13], but recent studies suggested that attentional processes are involved in the regulation of posture during simple or more complex tasks, especially when the latter involves attentional processes [14, 15]. …”