Abstract
The effects of cognitive performance of manipulated on a short period exercise. The following experiment is to warrant a clear understanding whether or not participants will work better after a physical activity component after being subjected to the Arousal Theory to enhance their cognitive performance. The Arousal Theory suggests that arousal of stimuli can act as a motivator towards or against cognitive performance. The participants for this experiment were asked to partake in two tasks to determine whether or not our hypothesis proved accurate, by doing so we manipulated two variables; the independent variable, the duration of an exercise task, against the dependent variable; a letter detection task.
EXERCISE AND COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE IN A LETTER DETECTION TASK 6
The impact of cognitive performance due to the effects of short period exercise. The experiment is to determine whether or not participants work best after a physical activity component being exposed to the Arousal Theory to enhance their cognitive performance. ‘The effect of exercise-induced arousal on cognitive task performance: a meta-regression analysis’ was an article written by Lambourne & Tomporowski in the year 2010, the article depicted the impact of cognitive performance when exposed to The Arousal Theory. According to Lambourne & Tomporowski (2010) The Arousal Theory suggests that the arousal of stimuli within our brain cells can act as a motivator towards or against cognitive performance as quoted in the article, ‘Cognitive performance may be enhanced or impaired depending on when it is measured, the type of cognitive task selected, and the type of exercise performed.’ (Lambourne & Tomporowski, 2010). Once established The Arousal Theory can impact cognitive performance, we must determine how much. The Yerkes – Dodson Law (article: Psychstudy) suggests arousal to a certain level can help performance however once the arousal crosses the optimal level, the performance of the individual starts to diminish. The overall findings of this experiment are to determine whether or not participants work best after a physical activity component being exposed to the Arousal Theory to enhance their cognitive performance. The general hypothesis of the experiment is the fact Cognitive performance will be higher in the 1-minute exercise condition (group 2) compared to the no exercise condition (group 1) whereas the cognitive performance was higher in the 2-minute exercise condition (group 3) compared to the 1-minute exercise condition (group 2). The 3 groups gradually range from no exercise to 2 minutes of exercise, the first group was depicted to act as a ‘control’ group where the group was completely void of any type of exercise before taking the letter detection task (Klein, Raymond M. & Saint-Aubin, Jean. 2016). This gave our report a clear understanding what to expect in regards to the basis of the experiment.
Participants comprised of 416 undergraduate students from...
