ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2024
Slowing of Movements in Healthy Aging as a Rational Economic Response to an Elevated Effort Landscape.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- How muscle ageing affects rapid goal-directed movement: mechanistic insights from a simple model.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- The neural basis of prosocial effort-based decision making in older adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Lifelong behavioral screen reveals an architecture of vertebrate aging.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Article
- Large reaching datasets quantify the impact of age, sex/gender, and experience on motor control.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Motor biases reflect a misalignment between visual and proprioceptive reference frames.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Comparing arm to whole-body motor control disambiguates age-related deterioration from compensation.Frontiers in aging · 2026Article
- The Sequence (S) index as a marker of diminished step-to-step transition efficiency in older adults.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Cognitive Impairment Is Associated with Disrupted Motor Planning in Older Adults.Neuro-degenerative diseases · 2026Article
- Life-long behavioral screen reveals an architecture of vertebrate aging.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Submovements in manual tracking: people with Parkinson's disease produce more submovements than age-matched controls.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2025Article
- Physical effort precrastination determines preference in an isometric task.Journal of neurophysiology · 2024Article
- Disentangling the effects of metabolic cost and accuracy on movement speed.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Why do we move slower as we grow older? The reward circuits of the brain, which tend to invigorate movements, decline with aging, raising the possibility that reduced vigor is due to the diminishing value that our brain assigns to movements. However, as we grow older, it also becomes more effortful to make movements. Is age-related slowing principally a consequence of increased effort costs from the muscles, or reduced valuation of reward by the brain? Here, we first quantified the cost of reaching via metabolic energy expenditure in human participants (male and female), and found that older adults consumed more energy than the young at a given speed. Thus, movements are objectively more costly for older adults. Next, we observed that when reward increased, older adults, like the young, responded by initiating their movements earlier. Yet, unlike the young, they were unwilling to increase their movement speed. Was their reluctance to reach quicker for rewards due to the increased effort costs, or because they ascribed less value to the movement? Motivated by a mathematical model, we next made the young experience a component of aging by making their movements more effortful. Now the young responded to reward by reacting faster but chose not to increase their movement speed. This suggests that slower movements in older adults are partly driven by an adaptive response to an elevated effort landscape. Moving slower may be a rational economic response the brain is making to mitigate the elevated effort costs that accompany aging.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.