Comparing the effectiveness of karate and fitnes training on cognitive functioning in older adults——A randomized controlled trial

Background：Recent studies demonstrate a slowdown in deterioration of cognitive functioning in old age through aerobic training.There is evidence that the combination of aerobic,balance,and coordination exercises leads to an improvement or maintenance of cognitive functions.Such age-related exercises can especially be found in East Asian martial arts.The purpose of the current study is to verify whether karate training for older adults improves cognitive functioning and,if an improvement can be found,which cognitive field are influenced Methods：Eighty-nine older women and men（mean age：70 years） participated in this study.The participants were randomized into 2 intervention groups（karate group and fitnes group,duration of intervention：5 months） and a control group.All participants had to accomplish a cognitive test battery before and after the intervention.In a secondary study the karate group had an additional intervention for another 5 months.Results：The results show that there is a significan improvement in motor reactivity,stress tolerance,and divided attention only after the 5-month karate training period.Additionally,the results of the secondary study indicate further improvements after 10 months.Conclusion：The 5-month karate training can help to enhance attention,resilience,and motor reaction time,but a training period of 10 months is even more efficient

Neural mechanisms of top-down divided and selective spatial attention in visual and auditory perception

Top-down attention mechanisms require the selection of specificobjects or locations;however,the brain mechanism involved when attention is allocated across different modalities is not well understood.The aim of this study was to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to define the neural mechanisms underlyingdivided and selective spatial attention.A concurrent audiovisual stimulus was used,and subjects were prompted to focus on a visual,auditory and audiovisual stimulus in a Posner paradigm.Ourbehavioral results confirmed the better performance of selectiveattention compared to devided attention.We found differences in the activation level of the frontoparietal network,visual/auditorycortex,the putamen and the salience network under differentattention conditions.We further used Granger causality(GC)toexplore effective connectivity differences between tasks.Differences in GC connectivity between visual and auditory selective tasksreflected the visual dominance effect under spatial attention.In addition,our results supported the role of the putamen inredistributing attention and the functional separation of the saliencenetwork.In summary,we explored the audiovisual top-down allocation of attention and observed the differences in neuralmechanisms under endogenous attention modes,which revealedthe differences in cross-modal expression in visual and auditory attention under attentional modulation.