title: Memorizing while walking: increase in dual-task costs from young adulthood to old age.
abstract: The dual task of memorizing word lists while walking was predicted to become more difficult with age because balance and gait are in greater need of "attentional resources." Forty-seven young (ages 20-30 years), 45 middle-aged (40-50), and 48 old (60-70) adults were trained to criterion in a mnemonic technique and instructed to walk quickly and accurately on 2 narrow tracks of different path complexity. Then. participants encoded the word lists while sitting, standing, or walking on either track; likewise, speed and accuracy of walking performance were assessed with and without concurrent memory encoding. Dual-task costs increased with age in both domains; relative to young adults, the effect size of the overall increase was 0.98 standard deviation units for middle-aged and 1.47 standard deviation units for old adults. It is argued that sensory and motor aspects of behavior are increasingly in need of cognitive control with advancing age.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. lindenberger@mx.uni-saarland.de
authors.forename: U
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Lindenberger
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Marsiske
authors.forename: P B
authors.initials: PB
authors.lastname: Baltes
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014825:Vocabulary; D016138:Walking