Increasing Gait Automaticity in Older Adults by Exploiting Locomotor Adaptation

These will be used in all experiments and consists of a time period during which the legs move at different speeds (0.5 m/s vs. 1 m/s). The investigators select those speeds since the investigators have observed in our preliminary data and published study (Sombric et al. 2017) that older individuals adapted at these speeds exhibit large deficits at motor switching when transitioning to overground walking. This large reference signal will facilitate the detection of a change in motor switching (Aim 2) following the Intervention.

This intervention consists of multiple short adaptation blocks (i.e., 6 blocks of 200 strides each) interleaved with short de-adaptation blocks (i.e., 5 blocks of 200 strides of tied-belt walking each). It was designed based on several studies showing improvements in adaptation rate in young adults with a similar protocol (Malone et al. 2011; Day et al. 2018; Leech et al. 2018).