Story at a glance
- Researchers at the University of Rochester found that some young people do well on cognitive tasks while walking, as the brain is changing resources to perform better.
- The team used a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system to monitor brain activity and behavior of 26 healthy individuals between the ages of 18 and 30 as the participants viewed images while seated or walking on a treadmill.
- Participants were asked to click a button whenever the image changed, but not when the image was a repeat of the one before.
Walking while engaging in a separate task, such as light work on a cell phone, could have a positive impact on the brain, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of Rochester found that some young people do well on cognitive tasks while walking as the brain is changing resources to perform better.
“There was no predictor of who would fall into which category before we tested them, we initially thought that everyone would respond similarly,” the study’s first author Eleni Patelaki, said in a news release.
“It was surprising that for some of the subjects it was easier for them to do dual-tasking — do more than one task — compared to single-tasking — doing each task separately. This was interesting and unexpected because most studies in the field show that the more tasks that we have to do concurrently the lower our performance gets.”
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The team used a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBi) system to monitor brain activity and behavior of 26 healthy individuals between the ages of 18 and 30 as the participants viewed images while seated or walking on a treadmill. Participants were asked to click a button whenever the image changed, but not when the image was a repeat of the one before.
A participant’s baseline performance was measured while they completed the tasks seated. And researchers noticed a shift in behaviors when the participants performed the task while walking. Some showed a decline in performance while others improved.
Electroencephalogram, or EEG, data revealed a change in frontal brain function in the 14 participants who improved when moving, suggesting increased efficiency.
“To the naked eye, there were no differences in our participants. It wasn’t until we started analyzing their behavior and brain activity that we found the surprising difference in the group’s neural signature and what makes them handle complex dual-tasking processes differently,” Patelaki said.
“These findings have the potential to be expanded and translated to populations where we know that flexibility of neural resources gets compromised.”
Researchers said their findings could open further opportunities to study cognitive functioning in older adults.
“These new findings highlight that the MoBi can show us how the brain responds to walking and how the brain responds to the task,” the study’s leader Edward Freedman said. “This gives us a place to start looking in the brains of older adults, especially healthy ones.”
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