Older adults use a variety of strategies to cope with the complex demands of daily life, such as when they have to perform an additional mentally demanding task while walking. Compared to younger adults, they generally show higher activation in anterior brain areas when doing so. However, it is not clear whether this increased activation is due to age-related inefficient neural processing or neurophysiological compensatory strategies. In a recent study in which we examined brain activation during walking in a complex virtual environment, our results tend to suggest inefficient neural processing, as older individuals with higher brain activation showed poorer behavioral performance than older individuals with lower activation, among other interesting results. Read the study here