The Relationship Between Physical Activity And Type Of Exercise And Executive Function In The Elderly

Research purposes: At present,the aging trend of the population in China is becoming more and more serious.There are many changes in the physiology and psychology of the elderly,among which cognitive aging is an important factor affecting the quality of life of the elderly.The aging of different cognitive functions is specific.Executive function is closely related to higher cognitive function and declines earlier.Physical activity can effectively delay the decline of executive function,but different physical activity level differences research on the components of executive function,and physical activity is different from exercise,many old people think of energy consumption of daily physical activity and body exercise as exercise,ignored the important influence of exercise on the body.Therefore,the level of physical activity that can effectively protect the executive function of the elderly and what type of physical activity should be maintained at each level need to be discussed.Executive functions include memory updating,inhibitory control,and attentional switching.The paradigm N-back task,used to measure memory updating,was found to have a ceiling effect on the 1-back task and a floor effect on the 2-back task in older adults.Existing studies used the two-element 1-back task to measure the memory updating function of the elderly,and the increase of stimulus repetition increased the difficulty of the task.In addition,the three continuously presented stimuli were divided into a group,which could be divided into four sequence types with different interference difficulty.This task could effectively explore the performance of suppressing invalid information in the memory updating task.Experiment I used the two-element 1-back task to do methodological verification research,and explore the inhibition of invalid information in the memory refresh task performance.Experiment II revealed the relationship between physical activity level and type of exercise and executive function in the elderly.Research methods: In Experiment 1,61 participants were enrolled in college students group and the elderly group.The two-element 1-back task was used to explore the performance of different age groups on the memory updating task.In experiment 2,147 elderly subjects were used to investigate the relationship between physical activity,type of exercise and executive function in the elderly by using the International Physical Activity Scale,the Exercise Style Scale,two-element 1-back Task,Task Switching Task and Stroop Task.E-Peime3.0 software was used to present the above paradigm,and SPSS20.0 software was used to analyze the response time and accuracy of the subjects.Research results: The results of experiment 1 showed that the ability of the elderly to updating memory was lower than that of the young.As the difficulty of the interference increased,the performance of the subjects in different ages decreased,but there was no significant difference in the performance of the elderly subjects,suggesting that inhibition of invalid information played a role in the response process,that is,the age-related decline of working memory did not increase with the difficulty of the interference.Therefore,the inhibition ability associated with distracting information may not be the key factor in the decline of memory updating.In the second experiment,three subcomponents of executive function,memory updating,inhibitory control and attentional switching,had a certain correlation with task performance.The decrease of inhibitory control and attentional switching ability were correlated with the decline of memory updating.In the study of the relationship between the level of physical activity and the type of physical activity and the executive function of the elderly,in the memory updating task,the elderly who participated in open-skill exercise had better memory updating function than those who participated in closed-skill exercise,and the elderly who participated in mixed exercise had better memory updating function than those who participated in closed-skill exercise.The elderly with high physical activity level performed significantly better than those with moderate physical activity level.In the attentional switching task,the elderly with high physical activity level performing open-skill exercise was better than those with closed-skill exercise,and the elderly with mixed exercise was better than those with closed-skill exercise.Moderate physical activity levels of the elderly closed-skill exercise was better than the elderly people who participated in open-skill exercise,mixed exercise was better than the elderly people who participated in open-skill exercise.In inhibitory control tasks the elderly with high physical activity level performed better than those with moderate physical activity level.The elderly who participated in open-skill exercise and mixed exercise performed better than those who participated in closedskill exercise.Research conclusion: The two-element 1-back task can effectively measure the memory updating function of the elderly,and explore the performance of suppressing invalid information in the memory refresh task.Elderly people with different levels of physical activity and types of exercise have different performance in different dimensions of executive function.In order to effectively prevent the decline of executive function,the elderly should choose the appropriate type of exercise according to their daily physical activity level.