The effect of distraction and feedback on prefrontal cortex activity and balance in middle-aged adults: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy pilot study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maintaining balance while simultaneously performing other tasks is common during everyday activities. However, this dual-tasking (DT) divides attention and increases cognitive demand, which can be detrimental to stability in older adults. It is unknown if the focus of attention influences how a dual-task affects balance and whether this is detectable in middle-aged adults. This study investigates the effect of dual-task and attentional focus on prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity in young (YA) and middle-aged (MA) adults using functional-near infrared spectroscopy. Blood oxygen level of the PFC was measured during a quiet standing cognitive-motor dual-task where MA (n = 15, mean age 57.2 ± 4.8 years, 5 female) and YA (n = 20, mean age 24.9 ± 4.7 years, 9 female) stood on a forceplate while either fixating their gaze on a target ('fixed') or viewing their real-time postural oscillations in the anteroposterior direction ('sway') with and without serial 7 subtractions. It was expected that the MA group would show higher PFC activity, larger COP excursions, and poorer performance during DT than the YA group. PFC activity was larger during DT and during the fixed condition but did not differ between groups. COP excursion was also greater when attention was 'fixed' and was consistently larger in MA. MA drove a positive correlation between PFC activity and COP excursion during DT indicative of a higher attentional demand during distraction. Taken together, this study suggests that PFC processing and posture control are different in middle aged adults compared to young adults.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".