Electrocortical correlates of the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and sustained attention in young adults

Francesco Di Muccio; Paolo Ruggeri; Catherine Brandner; Jérôme Barral

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108271

Electrocortical correlates of the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and sustained attention in young adults

Neuropsychologia. 2022 Jul 29:172:108271. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108271. Epub 2022 May 18.

Authors

Francesco Di Muccio¹, Paolo Ruggeri², Catherine Brandner², Jérôme Barral³

Affiliations

¹ Brain Electrophysiology Attention Movement Laboratory, Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Electronic address: francesco.dimuccio@unil.ch.
² Brain Electrophysiology Attention Movement Laboratory, Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
³ Brain Electrophysiology Attention Movement Laboratory, Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; Institute of Sport Sciences, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.

PMID: 35595065
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108271

Abstract

Cardiorespiratory fitness is thought to be positively related to sustained attention. However, the underlying mechanisms of this relationship have yet to be fully elucidated. The objective of this study was to i) explore the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and sustained attention in 72 young adults (18-37 years old) and ii) provide insight on the electrocortical dynamics supporting sustained attention performance in individuals differing in cardiorespiratory fitness by means of EEG topographic analyses and source localization. Behaviorally, cardiorespiratory fitness was related to faster response times and higher accuracy in the psychomotor vigilance task even when adjusting the model with confounding variables such as age, body mass index and chronic physical activity. However, there was no relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and the classic vigilance decrement observed in the sustained attention task. At the electrocortical level, higher cardiorespiratory fitness was related to increased global field power (310-333 ms poststimulus) localized in the posterior cingulate cortex (BA 30) followed by changes in scalp topographies around the P3b ERP component (413-501 ms poststimulus), which corresponded to earlier activation of the supplementary motor areas (BA 6). This is the first study using high-density EEG, which harnesses the whole spatiotemporal dynamics of the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and sustained attention in young adults.

Keywords: Cardiorespiratory fitness; ERPs; Physical activity; Sustained attention.

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Adult
Attention / physiology
Body Mass Index
Cardiorespiratory Fitness* / physiology
Exercise / physiology
Humans
Reaction Time
Young Adult