Department of Psychology, Institute of Human and Social Sciences, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan.
Department of Physical Psychological and Education Sciences, Faculty of Physical Education, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt.
Psychophysiology. 2020 Dec;57(12):e13674. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13674. Epub 2020 Aug 17.
The relationship of physical activity with interference processing was examined using behavioral and neuroelectrical measures in young adults divided into more active and less active groups. The participants completed Stroop (i.e., color-naming) and reverse Stroop (i.e., word-meaning) tasks that differed in the level of difficulty while event-related potentials were assessed. In the low interference Stroop task, participants were asked to respond to the ink color of the word, while the meaning was either congruent or incongruent with the color. In the high interference reverse Stroop task, participants had to indicate the meaning of colored words while ignoring the color of the font. The results indicated that young adults in the more active group exhibited a shorter response time (RT) and a lower intra-individual variability of RT than did those in the less active group. These behavioral differences were associated with larger P2 and P3 and smaller N450 amplitudes in the Stroop task and with larger P2 and N2 and smaller N450 amplitudes in the reverse Stroop task. No differences were observed in the contingent negative variation (CNV) between the groups. These findings suggest that, for young adults, regular physical activity is positively associated with a better neural efficiency in resource allocation for tasks that require the ability to inhibit cognitive interference and provide evidence for the potential neural mechanisms underlying the improved Stroop performance.
本研究使用行为学和脑电技术，考察了身体活动与干扰抑制之间的关系，研究对象为身体活动水平较高和较低的年轻成年人。参与者需要完成 Stroop（即颜色命名）和反向 Stroop（即词义判断）任务，两个任务的难度不同，同时评估事件相关电位。在低干扰 Stroop 任务中，参与者需要根据单词的颜色来做出反应，而单词的颜色与词义一致或不一致。在高干扰的反向 Stroop 任务中，参与者需要忽略字体颜色，只判断单词的词义。结果表明，与身体活动水平较低的参与者相比，身体活动水平较高的参与者反应时更短，反应时的个体内变异性更低。这些行为差异与 Stroop 任务中 P2 和 P3 波幅增大、N450 波幅减小以及反向 Stroop 任务中 P2、N2 波幅增大、N450 波幅减小有关。两组间的负性预备电位（CNV）没有差异。这些发现表明，对于年轻成年人而言，规律的身体活动与需要抑制认知干扰的任务中资源分配的神经效率提高呈正相关，为改善 Stroop 表现的潜在神经机制提供了证据。
