Exercise Intensity Linked to Attentional Control in Late-Adolescent Girls - Neuroscience News

Pindus and her colleagues used baseline data from a randomized controlled trial of high school students in New South Wales, Australia, to explore potential sex differences in the relationship between physical activity and cognition.

The data collected in that research included measures of daily physical activity volume and intensity as recorded by accelerometers worn on the wrist for up to seven days.

After controlling for other variables like body mass index and aerobic fitness, the team found that the intensity gradient corresponded with the girls’ ability to maintain their attention on a task in the face of distracting information in the cognitive trials.

This study aimed to examine the associations between PA intensity, volume, attentional control, and working memory and the moderating effects of sex in older adolescents.

Attentional control was measured with a standard deviation (SDRT) and a coefficient of variation (CVRT) of the reaction time on the incongruent trials of a flanker task.

The moderating effects of sex on the PA-executive functions associations, adjusting for age, BMI z-score, and cardiorespiratory fitness, were tested using multilevel random intercept models.