Abstract
Oftentimes we find ourselves in situations in which we need to perform concurrent motor and cognitive tasks like simple locomotion while being cognitively involved. In the present study, we investigated in how far cognitive and motor functioning interfere in an outdoor environment. Our participants performed an auditory oddball task while concurrently completing various motor tasks on the outside premises of our institute. Beside behavioural responses and subjective workload ratings, we also analysed electrophysiological data recorded with a 30-channel mobile EEG montage. We observed an increase of subjective workload and decrease of performance with increasing movement complexity. Accordingly, we also found a decrease in the parietal P3 amplitude as well as in frontal midline Theta power with higher motor load. These results indicate that an increased movement complexity imposes a higher workload to the cognitive system, which, in turn, effectively reduces the availability of cognitive resources for the cognitive task. Overall this experiment demonstrates the feasibility of transferring classical paradigms of cognitive research to real-world settings. The findings support the notion of shared resources for motor and cognitive functions by demonstrating distinct modulations of correlates of cognitive processes across different motor tasks.
Highlights
Movement and higher cognitive processes go hand in hand in highly developed organisms
In order to gain further insights into the interplay of motor complexity and the cognitive task, we introduced two target probability levels in the oddball task: high target probability (HTP) with 35% target stimuli vs. low target probability (LTP) with 20% target stimuli
The target probability main effect showed that participants rated high target probability (M = 3.6, SD = 1.99) as significantly more cognitively demanding (F1,19 = 6.73, p = 0.02, pcrit = 0.033, ηp2 = 0.26) than low target probability (M = 3.1, SD = 1.64)
Summary
Movement and higher cognitive processes go hand in hand in highly developed organisms. Relating to Baddeley[23,24], the distribution of attentional resources during dual-tasking is guided by executive functions which are related to higher cognitive processes In their meta-analysis, Al-Yahya et al.[25] showed that many measures of gait, especially walking speed, are negatively affected by a secondary cognitive task. When paired with a cognitive task, gait and coordinated movement have been shown to induce an additional need for processing resources[1,31] This dual-task interference may result in diminished performance and could lead to erroneous behaviour[32,33]. Recent research clearly demonstrated, that sensory and behavioural complexity is substantially increased in real world compared to laboratory settings This affects the task-related executive control functioning, especially if movement is involved[9]. We applied mobile EEG in order to measure electrophysiological correlates of task-related cognitive processes
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