Step by step: how daily walking is related to attention and self-control

People who walk more in their daily lives are better able to perform attention, concentration, and self-control tasks. American scientists found such a connection by comparing data from fitness bracelets and cognitive tests of more than 3 thousand people. The Izvestia article shows how many steps the participants took with the best results and what role blood pressure played.

How scientists measured daily activity

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in the United States analyzed data from 3,093 participants in the national All of Us program. Their ages ranged from 18 to 93 years old. The authors used information from 2009-2023. The number of steps was recorded by Fitbit devices, and blood pressure readings were obtained from electronic medical records. After that, the participants underwent computer testing of cognitive functions.

This approach made it possible to compare objective measurements of activity with test results. In many previous studies, scientists had to rely on how people themselves assess their workload. For example, in one of the reviews cited by the authors, self-reports were used in 44 out of 46 studies.

A person may inaccurately remember the length of their walks or overestimate how much they move. Wearable device readings help reduce this uncertainty. In addition, the researchers looked at physical activity along with pressure to assess their relationship to cognitive performance.

What abilities were tested on the participants

The testing included four tasks, each of which assessed a different aspect of brain function. Scientists were interested in the ability to hold attention for a long time, focus on the right information and filter out distracting signals.

Another task was to choose between immediate and deferred rewards. It allows you to study how a person evaluates a future reward and how much they tend to prefer it over an immediate one. The fourth test was devoted to recognizing emotions from faces.

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These skills are needed far beyond the laboratory. You have to keep your attention when working with documents or studying, and ignore interference when completing tasks amid conversations and notifications. Choosing between immediate results and future benefits involves planning and self-control.

At the same time, tests do not replace the assessment of all intellectual abilities. Therefore, the results of the work should be attributed primarily to those functions that the researchers actually checked.

What did the extra thousand steps show?

A higher habitual activity level was associated with better results in three tasks: sustained attention, control of distracting signals, and assessment of deferred reward. Each additional thousand steps per day corresponded to higher scores on these tests.

We are talking about the differences between participants with different levels of activity. It does not follow from this result that a one-time walk of a thousand steps will immediately improve concentration or decision-making ability. No comparable relationship was found for emotion recognition after other factors were taken into account. Thus, the pattern manifested itself in several cognitive functions, but not in all proven abilities.

Additionally, the scientists identified three groups with different activity trajectories. The average number of steps in them was 5,108, 8875 and 14,161 per day. Participants in the second and third groups performed better on these three tasks than people from the least active group.

However, the most active participants were not in the lead in absolutely everything. In the test for suppression of distracting signals, the highest results were found in the middle group. These data do not establish a universal rate of steps that would guarantee the best brain function.

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What role did blood pressure play?

Scientists have suggested that the association of activity with cognitive performance may partly be explained by blood pressure. For this purpose, systolic blood pressure (the upper number when measured) and diastolic blood pressure (the lower number) were separately analyzed.

Higher systolic blood pressure was associated with poorer performance on the deferred reward task. For the remaining tests, no statistically significant relationship was found after the necessary adjustments. Diastolic blood pressure showed no significant association with any of the four results.

The researchers then built a model evaluating the possible mediating role of systolic blood pressure. According to her calculations, lower blood pressure explained about 4.8% of the relationship between activity and the outcome of the deferred reward task.

This is a small part of the discovered pattern. The authors suggest that other processes may also be important: neuroplasticity, that is, the brain's ability to change its connections, a decrease in systemic inflammation, and glucose metabolism. In this work, such mechanisms were not directly tested.

Why the study does not yet prove an improvement in brain function

The main limitation is that cognitive testing was performed only once. The scientists knew the results of the participants after the data collection period, but could not compare them with the baseline level of these abilities.

Therefore, the work shows a link between previous activity and later test results. It does not establish whether the participants' abilities improved, remained stable, or decreased more slowly.

Feedback is also possible: it might be easier for people with initially higher cognitive scores to maintain an active lifestyle. The observational nature of the study does not allow us to definitively determine the direction of this dependence.

For the next stage, scientists will need repeated cognitive examinations. They will allow you to check how attention and self-control change in the same people and whether these changes are related to their daily activities.