how do changes in motor abilities of the elderly affect their personal and social adjustment?
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This paper reviews research on motor-skill learning across the life span with particular emphasis on older age. For this purpose, studies that focus on age-related differences in fine and gross motor skills and studies that analyze the further refinement of known skills as well as learning of unknown motor skills are summarized. The reviewed studies suggest that although motor performance tends to decline in old age, learning capabilities remain intact, and older adults are able to achieve considerable performance gains. The extent to which the learning capability varies with age, however, has to be considered very carefully. While most studies revealed that performance gains in fine motor tasks are diminished in older adults, results for gross-motor-skill learning are more contradictory. Additionally, there is considerable agreement on the finding that age-related learning differences are statistically more robust in complex tasks, whereas in low-complexity tasks, the learning of younger and older adults is very similar. This applies to fine and gross motor skills. Relative age differences seem to become enlarged when effortful resources are required for motor performance. Thus, the decline in motor learning that accompanies aging is task specific and not absolute.
Motor skills play a crucial role in all phases of the life span. That is, people of all ages perform fundamental motor skills, such as walking and grasping, or specific skills, such as hammering a nail, pitching a baseball, or driving a car. The measurement of motor skills is one of the fundamental aspects of measuring human performance. It is well known that aging is accompanied by impairments in sensorimotor [27] as well as cognitive and perceptual functioning [e.g., 41, 44, 50]. When people age, they perform complex tasks more slowly and, in some cases, less accurately than they once did. Additionally, they also begin to carry out such tasks in qualitatively different ways [11, 40]. If and how these age-related changes may affect the acquisition of motor skills has not been well investigated. Older adults need to practice and learn new and relearn known motor skills, respectively, as part of new task training, recreational pursuits, or rehabilitation.
During the past centuries, numerous motor-skill-learning studies have been conducted. Most of these studies focus on the processes that affect the learning of a movement task in younger adults. The main focus of motor-skill-learning research was on explaining and describing different variables (e.g., knowledge of results, contextual interference, organization of practice, attentional focus, transfer of training) that affect the planning and control of voluntary movements and the learning of motor skills (for an overview see [1]). Studies that investigate motor-skill learning in older age and across the life span are rare [40].
The aim of this paper is to review studies on age-related differences in motor learning across the life span, with special emphasis on older age, and to endorse a comprehensive perspective on motor development in general and motor plasticity in particular. First, related terms, such as motor learning and motor skills, will be defined, and typical schemes to classify motor skills will be described, followed by a literature review on motor-skill-learning studies. Studies that focus on age-related differences in fine and gross motor skills, and studies that analyze the further refinement of known skills as well as learning of unknown motor skills will be summarized, followed by a general discussion. In particular, the importance of life-span studies to judge older adults’ learning capabilities will be discussed. A comprehensive understanding of motor-skill learning may need to be especially informed by developments at both extremes of the life course: early childhood and late life.
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