Effects of aging on automatic and effortful processes in bimanual coordination

Two experiments are reported that compared younger and older adults on thei r performance of two bimanual temporal coordination tasks at varying moveme nt speeds. In many cases, older adults performed as well as younger adults at all speeds of an in-phase coordination pattern and at slow speeds of an anti-phase pattern for both coordination accuracy and stability. Age differ ences tended to emerge most prominently at high speeds for the anti-phase p attern. These findings are consistent with the aging literature regarding a utomatic and effortful processing distinctions, suggesting that relative ag e differences become magnified when effortful resources are required for mo tor performance.