To control hand movement, we have both vision and proprioception, or position sense. The brain is known to integrate these to reduce variance. Here we ask whether older adults integrate vision and proprioception in a way that minimizes variance as young adults do, and whether older subjects compensate for an imposed visuo-proprioceptive mismatch as young adults do. Ten healthy older adults (mean age 69) and 10 healthy younger adults (mean age 19) participated. Subjects were asked to estimate the position of visual, proprioceptive, and combined targets, with no direct vision of either hand. After a veridical baseline block, a spatial visuo-proprioceptive misalignment was gradually imposed by shifting the visual component forward from the proprioceptive component without the subject's awareness. Older subjects were more variable than young subjects at estimating both visual and proprioceptive target positions. Older subjects tended to rely more heavily on vision than proprioception compared to younger subjects. However, the weighting of vision vs. proprioception was correlated with minimum variance predictions for both older and younger adults, suggesting that variance-minimizing mechanisms are present to some degree in older adults. Visual and proprioceptive realignment were similar for young and older subjects in the misalignment block, suggesting older subjects are able to realign as much as young subjects. These results suggest that intact multisensory processing in older adults should be explored as a potential means of mitigating degradation in individual sensory systems.

中文翻译：

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老年人手的Visuo-Proprioceptive控制。

为了控制手部的动作，我们既要有视觉感，也要有本体感或位置感。众所周知，大脑会整合这些信息以减少差异。在这里，我们要问的是，老年人是否像年轻人那样以最小化方差的方式整合了视力和本体感受，以及年龄较大的受试者是否像年轻人那样补偿了所施加的视觉-本体感受失配。十名健康的老年人（平均年龄为69岁）和十名健康的年轻人（平均年龄为19岁）参加了比赛。要求受试者估计视觉，本体感受和组合目标的位置，而两只手都不能直接看到。在垂直的基线阻滞之后，通过将视觉成分从本体感受成分向前移动而不引起受试者的意识，逐渐施加了空间本体感受本体失准。在估计视觉和本体感受目标位置时，老年受试者比青年受试者更具可变性。与年轻受试者相比，老年受试者比本体感受更倾向于依靠视觉。但是，视觉和本体感受的权重与老年人和年轻人的最小方差预测相关，这表明在老年人中某种程度上存在方差最小化机制。视觉和本体感受的重新排列在错位区的年轻和年老受试者中相似，这表明年老的受试者能够像年轻的受试者一样重新排列。这些结果表明，应探索老年人完整的多感觉处理，作为减轻单个感觉系统退化的潜在手段。