The Effect Of Acute Exercise During Different Time Periods On Students’ Executive Control Functions

Today’s social development and progress brings about prosperity tohuman beings while also brings about conflicts and troubles. With the paceof life gradually accelerated, increasing pressure on people, they are toobusy to have time and opportunity to exercise. Therefore, more and morepeople have physical and psychological problems. Cardiovascular disease,obesity, depression and cognitive aging and other diseases have obviousincreasing trend. However, physical exercises have positive influence onpeople’s physical and mental problems. Many studies show that long-termphysical exercise can improve old people’s cognitive function, to someextent even reverse, and also can enhance children’s executive controlfunction. However, it is still in a debate stage about whether acute exerciseshave positive effects on cognitive function and executive control function ornot. It is likely that the intensity of acute exercise, type, research paradigmand the age, gender etc might causing some interference. As for what time ofa day to take exercise is the most favorable, people are short of knowledgeabout this and the research in this field is rare. Consequently,this study willexplore these issues and order to discover the different time period’acute exercise on college students’ executive control function of effects.Thirty-six college students were selected as subjects for experiment inthe study, who came from Inner Mongolia Electronic Information VocationTechnical College and the age of them between18and21. It is using2×(stimulus type: congruent, incongruent)×2(phases: pretest,posttest)×2(gender: male, female)×3(time period: morning, afternoon,evening) mixture experiment design. During experiment process, subjects were randomly assigned to the experimental group and control group. Firstly,all subjects complete color-object Stroop task pretest, and then subjects inexperiment group will do exercise for35minutes. After this, the subjectscomplete orally the RPE grade scale about subjective intensity of feelingand subjects in control group sit for35minutes. Finally, all subjectscomplete color-object Stroop task posttest, and then subjects’ reaction timeand correct rate of Stroop task are recorded by the computer. Theexperimental process with the three time period is the same.After the test, by using E-prime2.0and STATISTICA8.0, test data willbe sorted and analyzed, and the results are as follows:Firstly: the color-object Stroop task and typical Stroop task haveconsistent results, and the results show that it can effectively reflect thechanges in executive control ability.Secondly: Compared with control group, the subjects in experimentalgroup got higher scores and shorter reaction time, that is to say, exercise canimprove the executive control ability.Thirdly: During the difference time period, an acute exercise hasdifferent influence on color-object Stroop task.Fourthly: During different time period, an acute exercise has nodifferent effect on male and female subjects.Therefore, it is considered that the color-object Stroop task in the studyhave an better measurement of executive control function.Meanwhile, theyfound that acute aerobic exercise have a positive effect on the executivecontrol function by color-object Stroop effect reflect, and the acute exercisein different time period have different degree of influence.