Acute and Chronic Exercise Effects on Attentional Control in Older Road Cyclists

Abstract

Background: Research on visual attention control of older road cyclists, who represent a subgroup of traffic participants, is still scarce and studies on their attentional performance while cycling are completely lacking. Objective: The present study assessed whether attention control performance of older individuals with a history of participation in road cycling is affected by concomitant cycling exercise. Acute exercise effects were also analyzed in co-aged aerobically trained and sedentary noncyclists to assess whether the acute exercise-cognition relationship is moderated by individual differences induced by chronic sport practice versus sedentary lifestyle. Methods: Sixteen 60- to 80-year-old cyclists and 32 age-matched noncyclists (16 endurance athletes and 16 sedentary individuals) performed a go/no-go reaction time task in which visual attention was cued by means of spatial cues of different sizes followed by compound stimuli with local and global target features. Results: Older cyclists showed commonalities with and differences from other aerobically trained athletes. Both trained groups, when compared to sedentary individuals, showed shorter reaction time (RT) during physical exercise and a smaller RT disadvantage for unexpected local targets at short stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA). This expectancy-driven RT effect was stable across SOAs only in the case of cyclists. Conclusions: Results suggest that chronic long-term aerobic training may lead to favorable conditions for the occurrence of a facilitation effect during acute exercise and for a more efficient use of available resources on attentional tasks involving executive control. These results highlight the importance of considering the effects of aerobic exercise for supporting safe on-road behavior.

Long-Term High-Effort Endurance Exercise in Older Adults: Diminishing Returns for Cognitive and Brain Aging

“…The RVIP results may reflect this greater metacognitive awareness and attentional control. This is line with previous research as well observing that older expert orienteers, older cyclists, and older athletes having better attentional skills to modulate their attention and reaction time than nonathletes (Pesce, Cereatti, Casella, Baldari, & Capranica, 2007;Pesce, Cereatti, Forte, Crova, & Casella, 2011) and children participating in exercise interventions having increased meta-cognition as compared to their peers (Tomporowski, McCullick, Pendleton, & Pesce, 2015).…”

Executive function and endocrinological responses to acute resistance exercise

“…However, given the results of the present study, where exercise had similar effects on behavioral performance in both EI groups, it appears that, regardless of whether moderate or high intensity, acute resistance exercise could be a viable approach to enhancing the executive functions involving inhibitory control and attention in young male adults. The improved behavioral performance with regard to central executive functioning found in this work could be related to increases in neural activation or general physiological arousal (Magnie et al, 2000; Joyce et al, 2009; Lambourne and Tomporowski, 2010; Dietrich and Audiffren, 2011; Pesce et al, 2011). …”

“…With regard to resistance exercise, a growing number of work has strongly supported the view that executive functioning performance is enhanced via chronic resistance exercise (Perrig-Chiello et al, 1998; Ozkaya et al, 2005; Cassilhas et al, 2007; Liu-Ambrose et al, 2010), but that such a facilitative effect, as measured by behavioral indices, can also be found via acute resistance exercise (Chang et al, 2012, 2014). However, while previous studies have implicated the physiological (e.g., arousal) or hormonal (e.g., neurotrophic factors) responses to acute exercise intervention as the basis of any improvements in behavioral performance following physical exercise (Magnie et al, 2000; Joyce et al, 2009; Lambourne and Tomporowski, 2010; Dietrich and Audiffren, 2011; McMorris et al, 2011; Pesce et al, 2011; Tsai et al, 2014), no research has yet been conducted to explore the potential mechanisms underlying this process using electrophysiological and biochemical markers.…”

“…Cortisol can lead to arousal, as its release can limit the synthesis of the adrenocorticotrophin hormone (ACTH) and corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH), both of which modulate arousal (Lambourne and Tomporowski, 2010). Although exercise is also thought of as a stressor, an acute bout of aerobic as well as resistance exercise can increase the arousal status and neural activation, which further facilitate the central executive function related to the hippocampus and frontal lobe (Magnie et al, 2000; Lambourne and Tomporowski, 2010; Dietrich and Audiffren, 2011; Pesce et al, 2011; Chang et al, 2012, 2014). Given the conceptual links between cortisol and exercise, cortisol may be related to the effects of exercise on cognition (Henckens et al, 2012).…”

Failure to identify an acute exercise effect on executive function assessed by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test

“…Importantly, performance on executive tasks shows greater age-related reductions compared with non-executive tasks. 31,41 Previous studies have shown evidence that acute exercise has beneficial effects on executive function in older adults 8,15,42 and middle-aged adults. 43e45 More importantly, a meta-analytic review demonstrated that individuals with lower cognitive status, such as older adults and clinical populations, have larger positive effect sizes than the normal population, which implies that individuals with lower cognitive abilities may benefit from acute exercise to a larger extent.…”