The Effect of Aerobic Exercise on Visuospatial Attention in Young Adults.

Our objective in this study was to investigate the effect of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on visuospatial attention bias. We examined line bisection performance at rest before exercise and then immediately after exercise in 20 young adults. Pre-exercise, there was a larger leftward bias in subjective midpoint judgment of all participants than post-exercise (p < .001). Thus, leftward error magnitude decreased according to aerobic exercise, as there were rightward shifts after the exercise. The participants' performancse were modulated by the hand used to perform manual bisection tasks (p < .02). Participants erred to the left of the true midpoint with the non-dominant hand and to the right of the true midpoint with the dominant hand. The use of the non-dominant hand led to greater leftward error than the errors obtained using the dominant hand, though there was no interaction effect between hand use and effort. These findings suggest that moderate aerobic exercise can benefit visuospatial attention in adults.

Influence of target location, task complexity, and gender on children's use of their preferred foot.

The goal of the present study was to compare the choice of foot of right-footed children with varying strengths of foot preference when performing two tasks of different levels of complexity at three spatial locations. 30 right-footed children were tested. The results showed that the general tendency to use one's preferred foot to interact with an object is more or less pronounced depending on the object's location and the complexity of the task. The children used their non-preferred left foot more often during the simple task and when the object was presented to the left. Our findings also revealed interactions between gender, age, and spatial location. At five, girls used globally less their left foot than boys. In addition, girls used their preferred right foot more frequently than boys when the object was presented to the left. Based on these results, it can be concluded that foot selection depends on foot preference, task demand, environmental context, and biological factors associated with motor dominance.