Bimanual Coordination in Aging Adults
Summary
Bimanual coordination – the ability to perform tasks that require simultaneous use of both hands – is fundamental to daily activities such as dressing, cooking and typing. With advancing age, this capacity often declines, manifesting as slower movement initiation, increased variability in force output and reduced adaptability to changing task demands. Underlying these changes are age-related alterations in interhemispheric connectivity, neuromuscular strength and cortical recruitment patterns. Older adults may compensate for diminished primary motor pathways by engaging supplementary motor and prefrontal regions, yet this reorganisation can only partially offset losses in speed and precision. The resulting deficits have broad implications for independence, safety and quality of life in an ageing population and have spurred research into mechanistic pathways and rehabilitative strategies to preserve or restore coordinated bimanual function.
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Bimanual Coordination in Aging Adults publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in bimanual coordination in aging adults across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Bimanual coordination: The capacity to use both hands simultaneously in a temporally and spatially organised manner.
Role-differentiated bimanual movement: A task paradigm in which one hand stabilises an object while the other produces dynamic or alternating force patterns.
Interhemispheric connectivity: Neural communication between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, primarily via the corpus callosum, supporting integrated motor control.
Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA): A statistical technique that quantifies long-range correlations in a time series to assess the complexity of motor output variability.
Fixel-based analysis (FBA): A diffusion MRI framework that resolves crossing fibres to measure fibre-specific white-matter microstructure and macrostructure.
References
- Force Fluctuations During Role-Differentiated Bimanual Movements Reflect Cognitive Impairments in Older Adults: A Cohort Sequential Study. The Journals of Gerontology Series A (2024).
- Altered Bimanual Kinetic and Kinematic Motor Control Capabilities in Older Women. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2023).
- Fiber-specific variations in anterior transcallosal white matter structure contribute to age-related differences in motor performance. NeuroImage (2020).
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