Age-Related Variations of Visuomotor Adaptation Result From Both the Acquisition and the Application of Explicit Knowledge

The present study aimed to assess whether age-related differences in visuomotor adaptation are limited to the acquisition of explicit knowledge or extend to the application of the explicit knowledge in terms of deliberate strategic corrections. Old and young participants performed aiming movements, controlling a cursor on a computer screen with rotated visual feedback. Participants either received an explicit pretraining of the rotation or practiced a similar task that was unrelated to the upcoming rotation. Results show an age-related difference in the application of explicit knowledge and thereby extend previous findings of age-related differences in the acquisition of explicit knowledge.