Altering sensory cues for spatial navigation does not impose a dual-task effect on gait and balance.

Walking draws from a limited pool of attentional resources. Dual-task assessments, where individuals perform a cognitive task while walking, often reveal changes in gait and balance due to competing attentional demands. As cognitive task difficulty increases, the resources necessary to complete the task also increase, causing greater interference with gait and balance. However, these interactions are typically examined using contrived tasks, such as mental arithmetic, that do not often occur during walking. Therefore, it is unclear how the cognitive processes commonly engaged during walking interfere with gait and balance. In this study, we investigated whether increasing the attentional demand of spatial navigation, a cognitive process intrinsically linked to movement, interferes with gait and balance. Healthy adults completed an ambulatory virtual reality homing task in which they walked through a virtual environment and navigated to previously visited locations while wearing ankle and lumbar trackers. We increased the attentional demand of navigation by removing sensory cues during homing: full cues, body-based cues only, or visual cues only. Navigation performance declined as sensory cues were removed, but we observed no corresponding changes in spatiotemporal gait and balance metrics. These results show that, in healthy adults, increasing the attentional demand of spatial navigation did not interfere with gait and balance during real-world movement. These finding suggests that locomotor control may be robust to navigation-related cognitive demands. Further research is needed to determine why navigation did not interfere with mobility and to clarify the relationship between these processes.