Project TAM
The adaptive mind: cognitive and motor adaptation across the lifespan
Our aim is to investigate the developmental trajectories of cognitive and motor adaptation across childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and old age. We have developed a new task that has proven to be appropriate and sensitive for investigating developmental and individual differences within specific age groups. Our aim is to identify moderators, both cognitive and social, that may explain differences in cognitive and motor adaptability between individuals. This could improve our understanding of how to identify groups at risk of learning difficulties. The results of this study have the potential to motivate future research into interventions and prevention strategies aimed at facilitating the adaptation of individuals to their environment.
Changes in the environment require constant adaptation to optimise future behaviour and decision making. Cognitive adaptability is considered a sensitive marker of development and mental disorders, as it encompasses several aspects such as cognitive control, emotional consequences of positive and negative feedback, motivation and goal-directed behaviour. A lack of adaptability can lead to learning difficulties and symptoms of mental disorders.
Probabilistic reversal learning is a commonly used experimental paradigm for cognitive adaptation, in which individuals first learn action-outcome associations that must then be reversed and relearned. Because the feedback is probabilistic, there is some uncertainty as to whether the negative feedback reflects a real change in the environment or is simply information that should be ignored. The core of such cognitive learning is the assumption that individuals have an internal model of action values that is updated after each feedback by errors in reward prediction and is closely linked to dopaminergic activation in the reward network involving the striatum and prefrontal cortex. Adaptation processes have typically been studied in separate domains, such as cognition and motor behaviour.
Since such decision paradigms are usually performed in a highly artificial and isolated environment, we wanted to combine our cognitive adaptation paradigm with more complex motor behaviour, as this better reflects the dynamics in the real world. In addition, motor adaptation has usually been studied in isolation, where an ongoing movement suddenly interrupts an ongoing movement, e.g. reaching an object, leading to a degree of uncertainty, and in response and reaction requires adaptations to successfully perform the movement. Cognitive and motor adaptation processes have not been studied in interaction. To this end, we have developed a touchscreen-based task that reflects variations in the degree of uncertainty in both probabilistic learning, which reflects cognitive processes, and fast reaching, which reflects motor processes. The different levels of uncertainty require different levels of adaptation.
In addition to the combination of cognitive and motor adaptation, we are interested in how these two adaptation processes evolve across the lifespan, how they relate to basic cognitive processes (e.g. executive functions), and how they are related in individuals from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds (e.g. due to stress) and in certain developmental disorders (e.g. ADHD). Initial pilot results of our task indicate that it is easy to apply, can be administered to children from 6 years old to older adults, and that there are individual differences between age groups. Our aim is to develop trajectories for cognitive and motor and motor adaptation to different uncertainty factors, i.e. cognitive predictions under stable or changing environments and motor reaching behaviour under predictable or unpredictable targets. We also want to analyse the trajectories according to moderators of individual disposition and social environment, such as intelligence and socioeconomic inequalities.