Comparable Cerebral Oxygenation Patterns in Younger and Older Adults during Dual-Task Walking with Increasing Load
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The neuroimaging literature on dual-task gait clearly demonstrates increased prefrontal cortex (PFC) involvement when performing a cognitive task while walking. However, findings from direct comparisons of the cerebral oxygenation patterns of younger (YA) and older (OA) adults during dual-task walking are mixed and it is unclear how YA and OA respond to increasing cognitive load (difficulty) while walking. This functional near infra-red (fNIRS) study examined cerebral oxygenation of YA and OA during self-paced dual-task treadmill walking at two different levels of cognitive load (auditory n-back). Changes in accuracy (%) as well as oxygenated (HbO) and deoxygenated (HbR) hemoglobin were examined. For the HbO and HbR measures, eight regions of interest (ROIs) were assessed: the anterior and posterior dorsolateral and ventrolateral PFC (aDLPFC, pDLPFC, aVLPFC, pVLPFC) in each hemisphere. Nineteen YA (M = 21.83 yrs) and 14 OA (M = 66.85 yrs) walked at a self-selected pace while performing auditory 1-back and 2-back tasks. Walking alone (single motor: SM) and performing the cognitive tasks alone (single cognitive: SC) were compared to dual-task walking (DT = SM + SC). In the behavioural data, participants were more accurate in the lowest level of load (1-back) compared to the highest (2-back; p ˂ .001). YA were more accurate than OA overall (p = .009), and particularly in the 2-back task (p = .048). In the fNIRS data, both younger and older adults had task effects (SM < DT) in specific ROIs for ∆HbO (3 YA, 1 OA) and ∆HbR (7 YA, 8 OA). After controlling for walk speed differences, direct comparisons between YA and OA did not reveal significant age differences, but did reveal a difficulty effect in HbO in the left aDLPFC (p = .028) and significant task effects (SM < DT) in HbR for 6 of the 8 ROIs. Findings suggest that YA and OA respond similarly to manipulations of cognitive load when walking on a treadmill at a self-selected pace.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it