Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development , Berlin , Germany.
Front Psychol. 2013 Jun 3;4:316. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00316. eCollection 2013.
Theories of motor-skill acquisition postulate that attentional demands of motor execution decrease with practice. Hence, motor experts should experience less attentional resource conflict when performing a motor task in their domain of expertise concurrently with a demanding cognitive task. We assessed cognitive and motor performance in high-heel experts and novices who were performing a working memory task while walking in gym shoes or high heels on a treadmill. Surprisingly, neither group showed lower working memory performance when walking than when sitting, irrespective of shoe type. However, high-heel experts adapted walking regularity more flexibly to shoe type and cognitive load than novices, by reducing the variability of time spent in the single-support phase of the gait cycle in high heels when cognitively challenged. We conclude that high-heel expertise is associated with more flexible adjustments of movement patterns. Future research should investigate whether a more demanding walking task (e.g., wearing high heels on uneven surfaces and during gait perturbations) results in expertise-related differences in the simultaneous execution of a cognitive task.
运动技能习得理论假设，随着练习的进行，运动执行的注意力需求会降低。因此，在执行专业领域的运动任务时，运动专家应该会遇到较少的注意力资源冲突，同时还要应对一项具有挑战性的认知任务。我们评估了高跟鞋专家和新手在穿着运动鞋或高跟鞋在跑步机上行走时执行工作记忆任务的认知和运动表现。令人惊讶的是，无论鞋类如何，两组在行走时的工作记忆表现都不比坐着时差。然而，高跟鞋专家比新手更灵活地适应了鞋类和认知负荷，在认知受到挑战时，他们会减少高跟鞋步态周期单支撑阶段所花费的时间的可变性。我们得出结论，高跟鞋专业知识与更灵活的运动模式调整有关。未来的研究应该调查更具挑战性的行走任务（例如，在不平坦的表面和步态干扰期间穿着高跟鞋）是否会导致在同时执行认知任务时出现与专业知识相关的差异。
