Effects of acute aerobic exercise on exogenous spatial attention

Abstract

Objectives This study investigates the effect of acute aerobic exercise on exogenous spatial attention and executive control.Methods and design Participants performed an exogenous cueing discrimination task in three situations: at rest, while exercising, and immediately after exercising. The stimulus-response compatibility effect was also measured at each exercise condition.Results The results in the rest session showed the typical facilitation effect at the 100 ms Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) and the inhibition of return (IOR) effect at the 1000 SOA. While the facilitation effect was present in the three exercise conditions and there was not any significant difference in the magnitude of the effect between them, the IOR effect was significant only in the rest session. The stimulus-response compatibility effect was of a similar magnitude in the three exercise conditions.Conclusions This study demonstrates that, compared to a rest condition, an acute bout of aerobic exercise performed during or even immediately before the spatial task, modulates the deployment of exogenous spatial attention.

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Effects of acute aerobic exercise on exogenous spatial attention
Daniel Sanabriaa,*, Esther Moralesb, Antonio Luqueb, German Gálveza,
Florentino Huertasc, Juan Lupiañeza
aDepartamento de Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain
bDepartamento de Educación Física y Deportiva, Universidad de Granada, Spain
cFacultad de Ciencias de la Actividad Física y el Deporte, Universidad Católica “San Vicente Mártir”, Spain
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 31 August 2010
Received in revised form
16 March 2011
Accepted 8 April 2011
Available online 20 April 2011
Keywords:
Acute aerobic exercise
Exogenous spatial attention
Inhibition of return
a b s t r a c t
Objectives: This study investigates the effect of acute aerobic exercise on exogenous spatial attention and
executive control.
Designs and Method: Participants performed an exogenous cueing discrimination task in three situations:
at rest, while exercising, and immediately after exercising. The stimuluseresponse compatibility effect
was also measured at each exercise condition.
Results: The results in the rest session showed the typical facilitation effect at the 100 ms Stimulus Onset
Asynchrony (SOA) and the inhibition of return (IOR) effect at the 1000 SOA. While the facilitation effect
was present in the three exercise conditions and there was not any significant difference in the
magnitude of the effect between them, the IOR effect was significant only in the rest session. The
stimuluseresponse compatibility effect was of a similar magnitude in the three exercise conditions.
Conclusions: This study demonstrates that, compared to a rest condition, an acute bout of aerobic exercise
performed during or even immediately before the spatial task, modulates the deployment of exogenous
spatial attention.
? 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The relation between exercise and cognitive performance is
a current topic of research (see McMorris, Tomporowski, &
Audiffren, 2009, for a review). In the present study we investi-
gated the effect of an acute bout of aerobic exercise, performed
during and prior to the cognitive task, on the deployment of
exogenous visual spatial attention, measured by means of a typical
exogenous cueing task, and on executive control. Executive control,
considered as the mechanism involved in decision making, error
detection, generation of novel responses and inhibition of auto-
matic unwanted responses (Posner & DiGirolamo, 1998), was
measured by means of the response compatibility or Simon effect.
That way, we obtained an index of the difficulty in inhibiting an
automatically-activated response. In effect, when a stimulus is
presented to the right visual hemifield, participants respond more
rapidly with their right hand than with their left hand. In that case,
when a left response is required, the automatically-activated right-
hand response has to be inhibited.
The ability to move and focus attention across space is crucial in
sport contexts, to select and give priority to the processing of
stimuli that are relevant for behaviour (Allard, Brawley, Deakin, &
Elliott, 1989). In the laboratory, it has been repeatedly shown that
cueing participants to a specific spatial location speeds up reaction
time (RT) to a target presented at the cued location and often
enhances response accuracy on cued location trials as compared to
uncued location trials (e.g., Posner, Snyder, & Davidson,1980). Note
that visuospatial attention can be driven endogenously, by means
of central symbolic and informative cues, or exogenously, by means
of peripheral (informative or not informative) cues. When the
peripheral direct cue does not predict the target location, as in the
present study, the cueing effect is purely exogenous in nature and
depends on the time interval between the cue and target presen-
tation, i.e., the cue-target Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, or SOA. At
short SOAs participants typically perform better on cued location
trials than on uncued trials. However, the reverse pattern of data is
typically found at long SOAs (i.e., longer than 250 ms), an effect that
has been termed inhibition of return (IOR; Posner, Rafal, Choate, &
Vaughan, 1985).1The facilitation effect observed at short SOAs is
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ34 958246240.
E-mail address: daniel@ugr.es (D. Sanabria).
1The particular pattern of RT as a function of SOA on exogenous cueing tasks
does depend on other factors such as the type of task (detection, discrimination).
Note though that a comprehensive review on exogenous visual spatial attention
effects goes beyond the scope of this brief report. See Klein (2000) or Lupiáñez
(2010) for such a review.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Psychology of Sport and Exercise
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/psychsport
1469-0292/$ e see front matter ? 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2011.04.002
Psychology of Sport and Exercise 12 (2011) 570e574

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considered the result of the automatic capture of attention by the
cue. The IOR effect observed at longer SOAs is typically interpreted
as a cost in returning to an already attended spatial location (Klein,
2000). However, recent research has shown that IOR can be
observedevenwhenattention does nothave toreturn topreviously
cued locations (see Lupiáñez, 2010 for a review). Thus, the IOR
effect is interpreted as a cost in detecting the appearance of the
target, due to the habituation of attention at the location where it
was previously captured (Dukewich, 2009). In other words, the
target would be less novel and therefore would capture attention to
a lesser extent when it would appear at the previously cued loca-
tion, as compared to when it would appears at new (i.e., uncued)
locations.
The facilitation and IOR effects have been typically measured in
controlled laboratory environments where participants performed
the task at rest. However, in various sport situations spatial atten-
tion is deployed while the observer is under physical load that
increases his/her physiological activation. To the best of our
knowledge, there are not studies in the literature that have inves-
tigated the effect of exercising on the deployment of exogenous
visual spatial attention. This is rather surprising given the relevance
of exogenous spatial attention in multiple sport situations, e.g.,
a tennis player that has to focus his/her attention on the ball
ignoring all type of peripheral stimuli that may appear abruptly,
such as a camera flash. The closest approximation to this issue
comes from studies that have compared performance between
sportsmen/women and non-athletes in a visual spatial exogenous
attention task, but always at rest (e.g., Lum, Enns, & Pratt, 2002).
In contrast, numerous studies have investigated the effects of
exerciseonexecutivecontrol(seeHillman,Erickson,&Kramer,2008;
Tomporowski, 2003; for reviews of chronic and acute exercise).
For instance, Pontifex, Hillman, Fernhall, Thompson, and Valentini,
(2009) showed that participants’ RT in a working memory task
(that involved executive control) improved during an acute bout of
aerobic exercise as compared to a rest condition. However, other
studies have shown the reverse pattern of data, with an impaired
performance on incongruent trials on a flanker (control) task while
exercising (e.g., Pontifex & Hillman, 2007). Meanwhile, Davranche,
Hall, and McMorris (2009) failed to show any effect of acute
aerobic exercise on participants’ performance on congruent or
incongruenttrialsinaflankertask.Therefore,theeffectofexerciseon
executive control is currently not clear (see Etnier & Chang, 2009, for
discussion on this issue).
The present study was designed to investigate the effect of acute
aerobic exercise on the deployment of exogenous visual spatial
attention and on executive control. Executive control plays an
important role in open sports given the complexity and variability
of situations that typically require emitting novel responses and, in
some occasions, the inhibition of automatic behaviours. In contrast
with previous accounts (although see Audiffren, Tomporowski, &
Zagrodnik, 2009; Del Giorno, Hall, O’Leary, Bixby, & Miller, 2010;
Lambourne, Audiffren, & Tomporowski, 2010), we measured
participants’ performance in the cognitive task in three different
situations in the same experiment: At rest, while exercising, and
immediately after an acute bout of aerobic exercise, when partici-
pants returned to their baseline heart rate.
Pesce and co-workers (e.g., Pesce, Capranica, Tesittore, & Figura,
2002, 2003) have suggested that performing a visual endogenous
attention task (i.e., with predictive cues) while exercising induced
an increased allocation of attentional resources when participants
have tofocus on local or global stimulus features afteravalidlycued
trial, and a greater ability to refocus these resources following an
invalidly cued trial. Assuming that aerobic exercise has similar
effects on exogenous attention (note that, contrary to Pesce et al.,
we used non-predictive peripheral cues) we predict that the acute
bout of aerobic exercise will increase the cueing effect at the short
SOA and reduce, or even eliminate, the IOR effect at the long SOA
with respect to performance on the visual spatial task at rest.
Additionally, we will investigate whether exercising can affect the
deployment of visual attention even when the exercise is per-
formed immediately before the cognitive task. We did not have
a priori hypotheses regarding the modulation of the response-
compatibility effect by exercise given the contradictory results
present in the literature.
Methods
Participants
Twenty undergraduate students (two females; age range:
18e29 years old; mean age: 22 years old) from the Faculty of
Physical Activity and Sport Sciences (University of Granada, Spain)
took part in the study in exchange of course credits. All of the
participants informed to practice at least 2e3 (1-h aprox.) sessions
of sport/fitness per week. All reported normal hearing and normal
or corrected-to-normal vision. The experiment reported in this
paper was conducted according to the ethical requirements of the
local committee.
Apparatus and materials
Participants were fitted with a S610i Polar monitor (Polar Elec-
tro, Finland) to control their heart rate during the threshold session
and the experimental session. A Monark 864 cycloergometer was
used to obtain participants’ aerobic (AET; Mean ¼ 116 b min?1;
SD ¼ 14 b min?1) and anaerobic (ANT; Mean ¼ 152 b min?1;
SD ¼ 18 b min?1) thresholds and to conduct the experiment proper.
The cycloergometer was adapted to accommodate each partici-
pant’s height. A Lactate Pro lactate test meter and Lactate Pro strips
(ARKRAY, Inc., Japan) were used to measure participants’ levels of
blood lactate during the threshold session. A 19” LCD laptop
Toshiba PC was used to present the stimuli in the spatial attention
task. The centreof the laptop screenwas situated at 60 cm (approx.)
from the participants’ head and at his/her eye level. The stimuli
consisted of two boxes (3.80?? 4.80?) with their border in light
grey colour displayed on a black background, one to the left and the
other to the right of the fixation point, a cross (0.4?? 0.4?) dis-
played in light grey colour at the centre of the screen. The inner
edge of these placeholder boxes (where the target was presented)
was at 5.5?from the fixation point. The cue consisted of the flick-
ering (increasing the line-width of the border) of one of the boxes
for 50 ms. The target was an Xor an O (1?) displayed inwhite colour
for 100 ms at the centre of one of the boxes. Two response buttons
connected to the computer USB-2 port were used to collect
participants’ left and right responses. The E-Prime software
(Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) was used to
control for stimulus presentation and response collection.
Procedure and design
The participants visited the lab in four separate occasions,
always at the same time of the day (between 4 pm and 7 pm). In the
first session, the threshold session, their AET and ANT were
obtained using the Astrand protocol (Astrand & Rodahl,1986) with
the cycloergometer. Prior to the start of the effort test, the partic-
ipant was told to rest for 10 min approximately and then his/her
basal heart rate was annotated. The Astrand protocol consisted of
a submaximal incremental effort test with a fix cadence of 60 rev-
olutions min?1, starting with a power of 75 W and with increments
of 25 W every 2 min. The level of blood lactate was measured 30 s
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before every power increase, once the heart rate was stable at the
current power so changes in the level of blood lactate could be
measured. The level of blood lactate was also measured 3, 5 and
10 min after the effort test. The effort test was stopped as soon as
the participant reached the 4 mmols level of blood lactate corre-
sponding to his/her theoretical anaerobic threshold (seeKindermann,
Simon, & Keul, 1979). The AT and ANT thresholds were obtained
from the participants’ heart rate data and his/her levels of blood
lactate data. We used the Individual Anaerobic Threshold method
(Stegmann, Kindermann, & Schnabel, 1981) with the data of blood
lactate concentration at each phase of the incremental test and
during the recovery phase, plotting themwith the heart rate data of
the participant at each of these phases. In the second session (rest
session) the participant performed the spatial attention task while
pedalling with no resistance in the cycloergometer (note that the
participants heart rate was close to his/her baseline heart rate
during this session). This session was considered as baseline and
control condition and performed in first place to avoid any effect of
the order of presentation of the sessions, thus maximizing the
likelihood of obtaining the typical cueing effect (i.e., faster RT on
cued than on uncued trials) at the short SOA and the IOR effect (i.e.,
faster RT on uncued than on cued trials) at the long SOA.
Importantly, the rest session also served to measure the dura-
tion of the task, that lasted for about 20 min. In the next two
sessions, the participants performed the task during the acute bout
of aerobic exercise (online-effort session) or immediately after the
acute bout of aerobic exercise (post-effort session). The order of
presentation of the two sessions was counterbalanced across
participants. In the online-effort session, the cycloergometer was
set-up to a power corresponding to the power level at which the
participant was, approximately, at the 85% of his/her ANT (mean
heart rate across participants of 88% of the ANT, standard deviation
of 2.3%). The participant was then instructed to maintain the
revolutions min?1cadence and to perform the spatial attention
task at the same time. The experimenter controlled the partici-
pant’s heart rate throughout the session to ensure that it was
(approximately) constant (i.e., by reducing or incrementing the
power exerted by the cicloergometer in steps of 5 W). In the post-
effort session, the cycloergometer was set-up again to the same
power, and the participants’ heart rate controlled, as described for
the online-effort session. The participants were instructed to pedal
at a cadence of 60 revolutions min?1for 20 min (i.e., the same time
as in the online-effort session, corresponding to the duration of the
spatial attention task). They were then told to rest until their heart
rate reached their basal level (all of the participants reached that
level within 5e10 min). They had then to perform the spatial
attention task while pedalling with no resistance in the cyclo-
ergometer, similar to the rest session described above. All of the
participants completed the rest, online-effort and post-effort
sessions in three consecutive days.
Verbal and written instructions were given to the participant
prior to the start of the spatial attention task in every session,
stressing that they had to fixate on the fixation cross, try not to
move their eyes, and respond as fast as possible trying to avoid
errors. The spatial attention task consisted of the presentation of
the fixation point and the two boxes for a random duration
between 500 and 1500 ms. The boxes and the fixation point
remained on the screen for the whole duration of the trial. The cue
was then presented for 50 ms. After a SOA of 100 or 1000 ms (with
a 50% probability of occurrence of each SOA) the target appearedfor
100 ms, either at the cued location (cued trials) or at the uncued
location (uncued trials) with the same 50% probability. Participants
were instructed to discriminate whether the target was an X or an
O pressing the left or right button accordingly. The stimuluse
response key assignment was counterbalance across participants.
Compatible trials were those in which the target was presented at
the same side of its corresponding response button. On incom-
patible trials the target was presented at the opposite side of its
corresponding response button. The response window was set to
2000 ms and the inter-trial interval to 760 ms. Catch trials (11%), in
which the target was not presented, were included to prevent
response anticipations. Participants completed a practice block of
36 trials (not included in the analysis) in which feedback of
response accuracy was provided and 7 experimental blocks of 36
trials in which no feedback was provided. Participants were forced
to rest 5 s after each experimental block of trials.
The experiment constituted a within participants design with
the factors Session (rest, online-effort, post-effort), SOA (100,1000),
Cueing (cued, uncued), and Stimuluseresponse compatibility
(compatible, incompatible).
Results
Incorrect responses (4.76%), and trials with RT below or above
2.5 standard deviations from the mean (for every subject in every
experimental condition; 3.9%) were also discarded from the anal-
ysis. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was con-
ducted on participants’ mean RTs (see Table 1). The ANOVA
revealed a significant main effect of Session, F(2,38) ¼ 28.53,
p < .001, hp2¼ .6, with participants responding faster in the online-
effort and post-effort sessions (494 ms and 505 ms, respectively)
than in the rest session (562 ms; both ps < .01). The difference
between the online-effort and post-effort sessions did not
reach statistical significance, p ¼ .16. The main effect of Stim-
uluseresponse compatibility was also significant, F(1,19) ¼ 8.49,
p ¼ .008, hp2¼ .3, with faster responses on compatible than on
incompatible trials (513 ms and 527 ms, respectively). The inter-
action between SOA and Cueing was significant, F(1,19) ¼ 14.39,
p ¼ .001, hp2¼ .43. This interaction was due to participants
responding faster on cued than on uncued trials at the 100 ms SOA,
p < .001, while theywere fasteron uncued than on cued trials at the
1000 ms SOA, p ¼ .04, i.e., the typical IOR effect. Crucially, there
was a significant interaction involving Session, SOA and Cueing,
F(2,38) ¼ 4.82, p ¼ .01, hp2¼ .20. Planned comparisons were per-
formed to explain this interaction further. These analyses revealed
that the cueing effect (i.e., the difference between cued and uncued
trials) at the 100 ms SOA was significant in the three sessions
(rest ¼ 17.8 ms, p ¼ .006, online-effort session ¼ 9.3 ms, p ¼ .048,
and post-effort session ¼ 7.6 ms, p ¼ .04) and that there were not
significant differences in the magnitude of the effect between the
Table 1
Mean RT (ms) and percentage of errors as a function of Session (rest, online-effort, post-effort), SOA (50, 1000), Cueing (cued, uncued) and Stimuluseresponse compatibility
(compatible-comp-, incompatible-Inc-).
RestOnline-effortPost-effort
501000501000 501000
CompIncCompIncCompIncCompIncCompIncCompInc
Cued
Uncued
547 (4.2)
563 (3.6)
564 (6.3)
584 (7)
562 (2.7)
544 (3)
576 (5.4)
558 (6)
483 (4)
488 (4)
498 (3.6)
511 (5)
494 (5)
483 (2.6)
503 (6)
495 (5)
496 (2)
500 (2.6)
509 (2.7)
520 (4.4)
499 (3.2)
496 (2.7)
513 (4.7)
508 (4.4)
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three sessions (rest vs. online-effort, p ¼ .23; rest vs. post-effort,
p ¼ .1; online-effort vs. post-effort, p ¼ .74). However, the IOR
was significant only in the rest session (17.4 ms), p ¼ .009 (IOR in
the online-effort session ¼ 9.3, p ¼ .12, and in the post-effort
session ¼ 4.8 ms, F < 1). Moreover, the difference in the magni-
tude of the IOR effect was statistically significant between the rest
and post-effort sessions, p ¼ .03, and marginally significant
between the rest and online-effort sessions, p ¼ .06. The IOR effect
was not statistically different between the online-effort and post-
effort sessions, F < 1. None of the remaining terms in the ANOVA
reached statistical significance. A similar ANOVA on participants’
response accuracy did not revealed any significant term.
To investigate the temporal course of the effects described above
and also the potential effect of practice in the outcome of this
experiment we conducted a new ANOVA with the factors of Block,
Session, SOA and Validity (cf. Lambourne & Tomporowski, 2010).
Note that to obtain a valid number of observations in each condition
we collapsed the data from the seven experimental blocks in three
levels (1 ¼ blocks 1e3; 2 ¼ blocks 4e5; 3 ¼ blocks 6e7). Crucially,
there was again a significant interaction between Session, SOA and
Validity, F(2,38) ¼ 4.5, p ¼ .01, hp2¼ .19, that did not depend on the
factor Block as revealed by the non-significant interaction between
Block, Session, SOA and Validity, F < 1. A further experiment con-
ducted to control for practice effects (N ¼ 22 new participants;
withoutphysicalworkload)confirmedthatthemagnitudeoftheIOR
effect was not modulated across two consecutive sessions (9 ms and
14 ms, respectively, F < 1) of the exogenous spatial task used in the
present study (see also Lupiáñez, Weaver, Tipper, & Madrid, 2001).
Discussion
The results of the experiment reported in this study showed, for
the first time, that aerobic exercise modulates the deployment of
exogenous visual spatial attention. Acute aerobic exercise affected
participants’ performance both when it was concurrent to the
cognitive task and when it was performed prior to the cognitive
task. In the online-effort and post-effort sessions, the typical cueing
effect was obtained at the short SOA while no IOR was reported at
the long SOA. The lack of modulation of the stimuluseresponse
compatibility effect by exercise adds to the controversy regarding
the effect of acute aerobic exercise on executive control (see Etnier
& Chang, 2009), supporting previous accounts (e.g., Coles &
Tomporowski, 2008).
The present results support the hypothesis that acute aerobic
exercise increased the participants’ ability to refocus spatial
attention on locations that had already been attended, eliminating
the IOR effect. The effect of acute exercise occurred during a dual
physical-attentional task and persisted after the end of the physical
effort, at least until physiological arousal returned to basal levels
This latter result suggests that the effect of exercise on exogenous
visual attention lasts in time. Further research will be needed to
determine the duration of the effect of physical exercise on exog-
enous visual spatial attention.
We argue that physical exercise in our study enhanced partici-
pants’ attentional reactivity to peripheral stimuli so that target
discrimination did not show the IOR effect. From the traditional
view (see Klein, 2000), this would mean that exercise reduced the
effect of the inhibition process that refrained spatial attention from
returning to a previously visited location, or that it increased or
extended in time the facilitation effect. This explanation is also
consistent with recent theoretical approaches that consider the IOR
effect either as the result of the habituation of the orienting
response (e.g., Dukewich, 2009) or the cost in detecting the target
(i.e., a reduced capacity of the cued location or object to automati-
cally capture attention again; see Lupiáñez, 2010). Within this
framework, our results would suggest that physical exercise
stressed the attentional system making it more reactive to periph-
eral stimuli, by decreasing the likelihood of habituation of the ori-
enting response to peripheral potential targets. In the open sport
context,thiswouldbebeneficial,asitwouldimprovethecapacityof
the attentional system to respond to stimuli appearing at a given
location, no matter whether exogenous attention had been allo-
cated in that locationpreviouslyor not. Both relevant and irrelevant
(potentially harmful) stimuli would be processed more efficiently.
In sum, our results represent the first evidence that an acute
bout of aerobic exercise can modulate the deployment of exoge-
nous visual spatial attention, presumablybyenhancing the capacity
of exogenous spatial attention to respond to peripheral stimuli.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their
helpful comments during the review process. Thanks also to
Nicholas Holmes for his comments. Daniel Sanabria was supported
by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (SEJ-2007-
63645) and the Junta de Andalucía (Proyecto de Excelencia, SEJ-
06414). Juan Lupiáñez was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de
Ciencia e Innovación (PSI2008-03595PSIC and EUI2009-04082).
Daniel Sanabria and Juan Lupiañez were also supported by the
Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (CSD2008-00048
CONSOLIDER INGENIO).
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