Sebri Valeria, Savioni Lucrezia, Triberti Stefano, Mazzocco Ketti, Pravettoni Gabriella
Department of Oncology and Hemato-Oncology, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy.
Applied Research Division for Cognitive and Psychological Science, European Institute of Oncology IRCCS, Milan, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2019 Sep 13;10:2096. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02096. eCollection 2019.
From a cognitive-psychological perspective, physical exercise (PE) and sports are an interesting tool for improving people's cognitive abilities. One field of application for such a tool is decision making (DM) support in chronic patients, cancer patients, and survivors in particular. On the one hand, cancer patients and survivors have to continually take important decisions about their own care (e.g., treatment choice; changes in lifestyle), in collaboration with caregivers and health providers; on the other hand, side effects of treatment may be detrimental to cognitive abilities, such as attention, which make the health DM tasks even more demanding, complex, and emotionally disruptive for patients. Since cancer patients have to engage in healthy activities both for improving their own quality of life and for sustaining the effects of medications, clinical advice to engage in sport and PE is becoming more and more widespread within interventions. However, while sports are usually seen as healthy physical activities, their impact on cognitive abilities is mostly overlooked in the literature. The hypothesis of the present work is that sports could be fully exploited in their potential as focused exercises for cognitive ability training, in the field of cognitive training for chronic patients specifically. Indeed, literature shows that different sports (e.g., individual or team-based) influence and possibly augment cognitive abilities such as focused and divided attention, working memory, and DM under time constraints. Moreover, besides providing training for cognitive abilities, the experience of sports may represent an opportunity to explore, train and sharpen DM abilities directly: we identify five ways in which sport experiences may influence DM processes, and provide indications for future research on the topic.
从认知心理学的角度来看，体育锻炼和运动是提高人们认知能力的有趣工具。这种工具的一个应用领域是为慢性病患者、尤其是癌症患者及其幸存者提供决策支持。一方面，癌症患者及其幸存者必须与护理人员和医疗服务提供者合作，不断就自身护理做出重要决策（例如，治疗选择；生活方式的改变）；另一方面，治疗的副作用可能对认知能力有害，如注意力，这使得健康决策任务对患者来说要求更高、更复杂，且在情绪上更具干扰性。由于癌症患者必须参与健康活动以提高自身生活质量并维持药物疗效，因此在干预措施中，鼓励参与运动和体育锻炼的临床建议越来越普遍。然而，虽然运动通常被视为健康的身体活动，但它们对认知能力的影响在文献中大多被忽视。本研究的假设是，在针对慢性病患者的认知训练领域，运动作为认知能力训练的重点练习，其潜力可以得到充分发挥。事实上，文献表明，不同的运动（例如，个人运动或团队运动）会影响并可能增强认知能力，如集中注意力和分散注意力、工作记忆以及在时间限制下的决策能力。此外，除了为认知能力提供训练外，运动体验可能代表了一个直接探索、训练和提高决策能力的机会：我们确定了运动体验可能影响决策过程的五种方式，并为该主题的未来研究提供了方向。
