OBJECTIVE To establish whether changes in a spoken verbal task performance while walking compared with being at rest could predict falls among older adults. DESIGN Prospective cohort study of 12 months' duration. SETTING Twenty-seven senior housing facilities. PARTICIPANTS Sample of 187 subjects aged 75-100 (mean age 84.8 +/- 5.2). During enrollment, participants were asked to count aloud...

Most bipeds and quadrupeds, in addition to forward walking, are also capable of backward and sideward walking. The direction of walking is determined by the direction of stepping movements of individual limbs in relation to the front-to-rear body axis. Our goal was to assess the functional organization of the system controlling the direction of stepping. Experiments were performed on decerebrat...

We readily use the form of human figures to determine if they are moving. Human figures that have arms and legs outstretched (articulated) appear to be moving more than figures where the arms and legs are near the body (standing). We tested whether neurons in the macaque monkey superior temporal sulcus (STS), a region known to be involved in processing social stimuli, were sensitive to the degr...

What kind of leg trajectories are selected during human walking? To address this question, we have analyzed leg trajectories from two points of view: constraint and exploitation of redundant degrees of freedom. First, we computed the optimal leg swing trajectories for forward and backward walking that minimize energy cost for the condition of having some stretch of elastic components at the beg...