BACKGROUND The ability to safely conduct different types of walking concurrently with a cognitive task (i.e., dual task) is crucial for daily life. The contribution of different walking types to dual-task performance has not yet been determined, nor is there agreement on the strategies that older adults use to divide their attention between two tasks (task prioritization). OBJECTIVES To compa...

OBJECTIVES To investigate dual-task performance of gait and cognition in cognitively healthy and cognitively impaired older adults using a motor-cognition dual-task paradigm. DESIGN Cross-sectional retrospective study. SETTING The Basel Memory Clinic and the Basel Study on the Elderly (Project BASEL). PARTICIPANTS Seven hundred eleven older adults (mean age 77.2±6.2, 350 (49.2%) female an...

Numerous studies indicate fundamental limitations in the human ability to do multiple things at the same time. Recent theories on dual-task processing postulate the involvement of cognitive control processes in the coordination of the processing stream of multiple tasks. The most prominent neuroanatomical structure associated with the control of goal-directed human behavior is the lateral prefr...

Performance decrements in balance tasks are often observed when a secondary cognitive task is performed simultaneously. This study aimed to determine whether increased cognitive load resulted in altered reactive stepping in individuals with sub-acute stroke, compared to a reactive stepping trial with no secondary task. The secondary purpose was to determine whether differences existed between t...

Cerebral patterns of activity elicited by dual-task performance throughout the learning of a complex bimanual coordination pattern were addressed. Subjects (N=12) were trained on the coordination pattern and scanned using fMRI at early (PRE) and late (POST) learning stages. During scanning, the coordination pattern was performed either as a single task or in concurrence with a simultaneous visu...

Background We examined relationships between cerebral amyloid-beta (Aβ) and cognitive-gait dual-task performance in 27 cognitively normal, mobility unimpaired elders. Methods We assessed Aβ on Pittsburgh Compound B (PiB)-PET. We measured gait speed separately and while performing working-memory, response-inhibition, motor-sequencing, and phone-dialing tasks. We compared dual-task costs on gai...

Multitasking requires individuals to allocate their cognitive resources across different tasks. The purpose of the current study was to assess school-age children's multitasking abilities during degraded speech recognition. Children (8 to 12 years old) completed a dual-task paradigm including a sentence recognition (primary) task containing speech that was either unprocessed or noise-band vocod...

Response-related mechanisms of multitasking were studied by analyzing simultaneous processing of responses in different modalities (i.e., crossmodal action). Participants responded to a single auditory stimulus with a saccade, a manual response (single-task conditions), or both (dual-task condition). We used a spatially incompatible stimulus-response mapping for one task, but not for the other....