The possible positive effects of physical exercise on the global motion perception aging: the cognitive mechanism

Ziping Liang; Lei Zhang; Pengpeng Wang; Yuping Zhang; Yaoyuan Xia; Hua Jin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1323291

The possible positive effects of physical exercise on the global motion perception aging: the cognitive mechanism

Front Psychol. 2024 Jan 24:15:1323291. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1323291. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Ziping Liang^#¹, Lei Zhang^#², Pengpeng Wang³, Yuping Zhang⁴, Yaoyuan Xia⁵, Hua Jin⁶

Affiliations

¹ Mental Health Education Center, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China.
² School of Physical Education (Main Campus), Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China.
³ College of Psychology, Xinjiang Normal University, Urumqi, China.
⁴ Medicine School of Rehabilitation, Henan University of Chinese Medicine, Zhengzhou, Henan, China.
⁵ Department of Physical Education, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.
⁶ Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Social Science Laboratory of Students' Mental Development and Learning, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Background: Sensitivity to global motion perception (GMP) decreases gradually with age, and the mechanism to effectively alleviate its aging process is still unclear. This study aimed to examine the impact and mechanism of exercise on GMP aging.

Methods: This study adopted the global motion direction discrimination task and used motion coherence thresholds to assess GMP sensitivity. It adopted the perceptual template model (PTM) to fit the GMP processing efficiency.

Results: The threshold for the elderly group with no exercise was higher than that of the elderly group with exercise, while the threshold of the latter was higher than that of the youth group. The results of the model fitting showed that both models, A_a and A_f, corresponding to the elderly group with exercise and the elderly group with no exercise, respectively, were the best-fitted models when compared with that of the youth group. Compared to the elderly group with no exercise, models A_a and A_f, were the best-fitted models.

Conclusion: These results showed that good exercise habits might have a certain degree of positive effect on GMP aging, by lower their internal additive noise (A_a), and improve the ability to eliminate external noise (A_f).

Keywords: aging; cognitive; exercise; global motion perception; perceptual template model.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31971021).