summary: Teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 18 who engage in frequent moderate-to-vigorous exercise have better control over their attention, a new study reports.
sauce: University of Illinois
Adolescent girls who engage in more moderate and vigorous physical activity each day have better control over their attention, a new study reveals. This study focuses on girls and boys aged 15-18.
For details of the survey results, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.
“Attention control is an aspect of inhibitory control. Inhibitory control can be thought of as the ability to control attention when it is distracted, and the ability to control acting on impulses,” he says. Dominica Pindus, professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led the study, said, “Research shows that inhibitory control is associated with better academic performance. ”
Previous research has also found that better inhibitory control is associated with “having better finances, being healthier, and being less likely to be convicted of a crime.”
Pindus and her colleagues investigated possible gender differences in the relationship between physical activity and cognition using baseline data from a randomized controlled trial of high school students in New South Wales, Australia. Co-author David Lubans of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, led the initial study.
Data collected in that study included daily physical activity volume and intensity measurements recorded by an accelerometer worn on the wrist for up to 7 days.
“The device records changes in acceleration, and what we get is a continuous signal of the strength of movement,” Pindus said.
Participants also engaged in a computerized cognitive task. “In this study, we looked at the variability in participants’ reaction times across trials. This measure helps us understand the efficiency of higher attentional control,” he said.
Older adolescents’ accuracy and speed rivaled adults’ performance on attention-control tasks, according to Pindus.
“However, the difference in reaction times from one trial to another is greater in adolescents than in adults. Greater variability in performance is associated with less efficient attentional control. Thus, variability in response time is , reasoned that physical activity in older adolescents may be more adaptable,” said Pindus.
Researchers assessed the intensity of physical activity in students over time using a scale called an “intensity gradient.”
“The intensity gradient represents an individual’s daily intensity profile,” the researchers wrote. To assess it, researchers look at the slope of a line on a graph that shows the intensity of an individual’s activity during her day.
As a person does more moderate to vigorous activity over time, the slope becomes shallower. Steeper descents occur as a person engages in less vigorous activities over time.
After adjusting for other variables such as body mass index and aerobic fitness, the team determined that the intensity gradients corresponded to the girls’ ability to maintain attention on the task in the face of distracting information on a cognitive test. I found
Girls who accumulated less physical activity throughout the day were longer and less accurate on tests involving ignoring distracting information, the researchers report.
These associations are small to moderate, but important, according to Pindus.
“We know we are not doing a good job when it comes to getting adolescents involved in physical activity,” she said. Inactive: Boys are more physically active than girls and tend to engage in higher-intensity physical activity.”
The new study offers a glimpse of the possible consequences of these discrepancies that need to be explored in randomized controlled trials, Pindus said.
“It shows that intervention strategies that involve the least physically active girls in high-intensity physical activity may need to focus on enhancing cognitive functions that are important for academic performance,” she said. Told.
See also
Pindus is an affiliate of the Beckmann Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
Funding: The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council supported this research.
About this exercise and attention research news
author: Diana Yates
sauce: University of Illinois
contact: Diana Yates – University of Illinois
image: image is public domain
Original research: open access.
“Sex moderates the association between physical activity intensity and attentional control in older adolescents” Dominika Pindus et al. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports
overview
Sex moderates the association between physical activity intensity and attentional control in older adolescents
prologue
The relationship between physical activity (PA) intensity and executive function in older adolescents remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to examine the association between PA intensity, volume, attentional control, working memory, and the relaxing effects of sex in older adolescents.
Method
418 participants (211 female, MYear = 16.5 ± 0.40 years) from the Burn 2 Learn trial. The youth wore his GT9X Link accelerometer on his non-dominant wrist 24 hours a day for 7 days.-1PA intensity was expressed as intensity gradient (IG) and moderate to severe PA (MVPA, Hildebrand cut point). PA volume was expressed as average acceleration (AvACC). Attentional control was measured by the standard deviation (SDRT) and the coefficient of variation (CVRT) of reaction time on the discrepancy test of the Flanker task. Working memory was expressed as ad prime (signal discrimination index) on the 2-back task. Adjusting for age, BMI z-score, and cardiorespiratory fitness, the moderating effects of sex on PA executive function associations were tested using a multilevel random intercept model.
result
After controlling for AvACC, sex moderated the relationship between IG and inconsistent SDRT (B. = 0.53, 95% CI: 0.12, 0.94) and CVRT (B. = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.22, 1.05; ps ≤ 0.002). Only the girl with the higher IG showed her SDRT and CVRT with smaller misfits (B.s≤−0.26, ps ≤ 0.01). IG was not associated with working memory. AvACC and MVPA were not associated with attentional control or working memory.
Conclusion
Our findings reveal a novel association between high-intensity PA and superior attentional control among adolescent girls.
