Does proprioceptive acuity influence the extent of implicit sensorimotor adaptation in young and older adults?

The ability to adjust movements to changes in the environment declines with aging. This age-related decline is caused by the decline of explicit adjustments. However, implicit adaptation remains intact and might even be increased with aging. Since proprioceptive information has been linked to implicit adaptation, it might well be that an age-related decline in proprioceptive acuity might be linked to the performance of older adults in implicit adaptation tasks. Indeed, age-related proprioceptive deficits could lead to altered sensory integration with an increased weighting of the visual sensory-prediction error. Another possibility is that reduced proprioceptive acuity results in an increased reliance on predicted sensory consequences of the movement. Both these explanations led to our preregistered hypothesis: we expected a relation between the decline of proprioception and the amount of implicit adaptation across ages. However, we failed to support this hypothesis. Our results question the existence of reliability-based integration of visual and proprioceptive signals during motor adaptation.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Is proprioceptive acuity linked to amount of implicit motor adaptation across ages? The latter is larger in old compared with younger people? In light of reliability-based sensory integration, we hypothesized that this larger implicit adaptation was linked to an age-related lower reliability of proprioception. Over 2 experiments and 130 participants, we failed to find any evidence for this. We discussed alternative explanations for the increase in implicit adaptation with age and the validity of our proprioceptive assessment.