Comparison of dependency to attention for implicit sequential motor learning in young and elderly groups

Complex motor behaviors are formed from a chain of primitive behaviors. Motor sequence is the basis of a lot of human's intelligent behavior. The purpose of this study was to compare the amount of dependency on attention in implicit sequential motor learning in two groups of youth and elderly. Two groups including 15 young people, aged 20 to 30 years, and 15 elderly, aged 60 to 75 years from Kashan Retired Teachers Center, enrolled to this study in 2007. For data analysis, SPSS version 13 and ANOVA test for estimation of number of responses, errors and the efficiency of the second task paired t-test for comparing the regular and irregular blocks in one group and independent t-test for comparison of two groups of youth and elderly people were used. The study showed that in young group exposed to the mutual task, response time and errors of the first task (the time of sequence response) decreased. In elderly group, the response time and errors didn’t show a significant difference in both regular and irregular phases. The efficiency of the second task didn’t show any significant difference in the two groups. Implicit learning in elderly is dependent on attention. According to the findings, motor learning in rehabilitation and exercise therapy of elder adults should not overloaded by the cognitive tasks