Human brain performance in complex temporal and spatial processing tasks and the effect of aging.

摘要

This thesis presents psychophysical experiments investigating the healthy human brain performance at different ages in repetitive motor tasks with simple and complex spatiotemporal patterns. A 2DOF manipulandum and two sets of interactive computer games were used in this study. The first game is a falling target that should be caught under different temporal constraints changing in every new trial by a change in the target's falling rate. This game is aimed to investigate the temporal perception in human. The second game is to test the sense of spatial orientation. In every new trial of this game, the subject must take the cursor to a desired final destination that is assigned randomly from a total number of four final destinations. These games were tested on healthy young adult subjects (20 to 30 years old), elderly (65+ years), and children (7 to 12 years old).;Results show human brain efficiency in well-performing less complex temporal and spatial processing tasks; in addition, it is found that young adult subjects significantly outperform elderly and children groups in such tasks, with a similar performance observed for the later groups. 111