Abstract
Background
The methods used for evaluating body movements—driven by the functions of the brain and nervous system—do not facilitate the evaluation of internal events such as brain/nervous system activity related to the output process, thus necessitating development of an evaluation method for human physical function that focuses on the function of the brain and nervous system.
Aim
To investigate the differences in brain and nervous system function during different walking tasks.
Methods
The participants were 10 healthy adults (10 women, aged 19–35 years). The exercise tasks were (i) a 20-m round-trip walk as a normal walk and (ii) a target-task walk, which involved walking with the task of stepping on a line every 3 m on a course similar to that for normal walking. Electromyography (EMG) was applied to the proximal tibialis anterior (pTA), distal tibialis anterior (dTA), medial gastrocnemius (MG), and lateral gastrocnemius (LG) muscles to record muscle activity.
Results
No difference was noted between normal walking and target-task walking for the pTA and dTA (t(9) = 0.479, P = 0.643, d = 0.090). However, between the MG and LG, coherence in target-task walking showed a trend toward higher values ((t(8)) = -2.185, P = 0.060, d = -0.404), although this was not statistically significant.
Conclusions
The results of this study indicate that the neural drive might be stronger during target walking movements with visual tasks than during simple walking movements, and that neural activity tends to be more active when accompanied by visual feedback.