Regular Vigorous-Intensity Physical Activity and Walking Are Associated with Divergent but not Convergent Thinking in Japanese Young Adults.

Masako Hirotsu,Kosuke Hagiwara,Chong Chen,Yasuhiro Mochizuki,Shin Nakagawa

doi:10.3390/brainsci11081046

Masako Hirotsu, Kosuke Hagiwara + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11081046

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Abstract

The beneficial effects of regular physical activity (PA) on cognitive functions have received much attention. Recent research suggests that regular PA may also enhance creative thinking, an indispensable cognitive factor for invention and innovation. However, at what intensity regular PA brings the most benefits to creative thinking remains uninvestigated. Furthermore, whether the levels of regular PA affect the acute PA effects on creative thinking is also unclear. In the present study, using a previous dataset that investigated the effects of an acute bout of aerobic exercise on creative thinking in healthy Japanese young adults (22.98 ± 1.95 years old) in the year 2020, we tested the association between different intensities of regular PA (i.e., vigorous, moderate, and walking) and creative thinking with the cross-sectional baseline data using multiple linear regression. We also investigated whether regular PA levels were associated with the acute aerobic exercise intervention effects on creative thinking. The results showed that cross-sectionally, the regular PAs were differentially associated with divergent but not convergent thinking. Specifically, whereas the amount of vigorous-intensity PA was positively associated with fluency and flexibility, the amount of walking was positively associated with novelty on the alternate uses test (AUT) measuring divergent thinking. Importantly, the explained variances of fluency, flexibility, and novelty were 20.3% (p = 0.040), 18.8% (p = 0.055), and 20.1% (p = 0.043), respectively. None of the regular PAs predicted convergent thinking (i.e., an insight problem-solving task), nor were they associated with the acute aerobic exercise intervention effects on divergent and convergent thinking. These findings suggest that engaging in regular vigorous-intensity PA and walking may be useful strategies to enhance different aspects of divergent thinking in daily life.

Highlights

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that adults aged 18–61 years should conduct at least 150 min of moderate-intensity physical activity (PA), 75 min of vigorous-intensity PA, or an equivalent combination of both moderate- and vigorousintensity PA [1]
Spearman correlation analysis indicated that total PA was marginally associated with fluency and flexibility but not novelty on alternate uses test (AUT) of divergent thinking (Figure 2)
In a sample of young adults, we found that regular vigorous-intensity PA was positively associated with fluency and flexibility, while regular walking was positively associated with novelty of divergent thinking

Summary

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that adults aged 18–61 years should conduct at least 150 min of moderate-intensity physical activity (PA), 75 min of vigorous-intensity PA, or an equivalent combination of both moderate- and vigorousintensity PA [1] In line with this recommendation, a growing body of research has confirmed that engaging in regular PA enhances a wide range of cognitive functions, including attention, executive functions, memory storage and retrieval, and so on (for reviews and meta-analyses, [2,3,4,5]). Divergent thinking involves generating multiple, novel solutions and is commonly assessed by the alternate uses test (AUT, [9]) or the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking [10]. In the AUT, for instance, subjects are asked to write down as many as possible unique, original uses of common objects such as “brick”

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