A new study by researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester has found that some young and healthy people improve performance on cognitive tasks while walking by changing the use of neural resources.
The study, published in Cerebral Cortex, monitored the brain activity, kinematics, and behavior of 26 healthy 18 to 30-year-olds as they looked at a series of images, either while sitting or walking on a treadmill. The participants were asked to click a button each time the image changed and if the same image appeared back-to-back, they were asked not to click.
Performance achieved by each participant while sitting was considered their personal behavioral “baseline”. When walking was added to performing the same task, researchers found that different behaviors appeared, with some people performing worse than their sitting baseline, but also with some others improving compared to their sitting baseline. The electroencephalogram (EEG) data showed that the 14 participants who improved at the task while walking had a change in frontal brain function which was absent in the 12 participants who did not improve. This brain activity change exhibited by those who improved at the task suggests increased flexibility or efficiency in the brain.
“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,” said Eleni Patelaki, a biomedical engineering PhD student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and the study’s lead author. “These findings have the potential to be expanded and translated to populations where we know that flexibility of neural resources gets compromised.”
The researchers believe that expanding this research to older adults could help identify a possible marker for “super agers” or people who have a minimal decline in cognitive functions. This would provide insight into neurodegenerative diseases.
This research was supported by the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience Pilot Program, the University of Rochester CTSA award number KL2 TR001999 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institutes of Health.