Cognitive Aspects of Motor Functioning

The focus of this article is on two sets of phenomena in which cognitive factors have been found to influence motor functioning and that have also been found to have important implications for the interpretation of the effects of aging on motor performance. The approach in each case will be to first discuss the general phenomenon and then to describe the effects of age on that phenomenon, together with an indication of the significance of those effects for research on aging. It is important to begin by indicating the very restricted sense in which the term motor functioning will be used in this article. Because the phenomena to be discussed involve simple keypress responses, motor functioning will refer to the speed of executing finger depressions of response keys -or what is commonly known as manual reaction time. This is clearly an extremely limited form of motor functioning, but it has had a long history of investigation in psychology. In part, this is because many researchers have felt that an individual’s reaction time somehow reflects the integrity of his or her central nervous system. Some theorists have even speculated that reaction time measures might be used to provide a culture-fair index of intelligence; indeed, a number of studies have reported statistically significant correlations between certain reaction time measures and scores on assorted intellectual tests. However, the concern in this article is not with manual reaction time as a measure of cognitive performance, but rather, as the title suggests, on how cognitive factors can influence this very simple type of motor functioning.