Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
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Can you multitask on a treadmill?

5/2/2016

 
One of my graduate school mentors noted that if he was walking when presented with a really difficult cognitive challenge, he would stop, as though walking drew, however slightly, on his attention. Rousseau, in contrast, claimed “I can only meditate when I am walking.”
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The advent of the treadmill desk makes the question of walking and cognition more urgent. Okay, there may be health benefits, but if walking is not fully automatic, it siphons away some of your thinking capacity; it demands multitasking, so why put one in the workplace? 
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Researchers have caught up to business trends, and a couple of recent studies indicate that dedicated office walkers can relax—treadmills don’t seem to compromise cognition. Probably.

In one, researchers administered well-normed measures of working memory and executive function (digit span forwards and backwards, digit-symbol coding, letter-number substitution, and others) to 45 college undergraduates. Each completed the tasks while sitting, standing, and walking (in random order), with 1 week elapsing between sessions. Participants could set the walking speed as they preferred, between 1 and 3 km/hour. Performance on the working memory/executive function tasks was statistically indistinguishable in the three conditions.

That study had people walk (or not) and measured the impact on working memory. Another approach is for researchers to tax working memory (or not) and observe the impact on walking. Other researchers used that method, having subjects either just walk (again, at a self-selected pace), or walk while performing a working memory task, or walk while reading. Researchers recorded several aspects of gait, focusing on variability. Again, they found no evidence of interference.

The neurophysiology of walking would seem consistent with these results. Humans have central pattern generators in the spinal cord—neural circuits that, even in the absence of input of the brain, can generate patterns of flexion and extension in muscles that look like walking. Thus, if the spinal cord can handle walking on its own, it’s easy to see why walking is not compromised when the brain is doing something else.

But central pattern generators set up pretty crude motor output; locomotion (like all movement) requires close monitoring of perceptual feedback (from vision, from balance) which is used to fine-tune walking movements (For a review, see Clark, 2015). We notice the need for perceptual information when we walk on ice, and for motor tuning when we pick our way through a rocky beach, but the fine-tuning goes on in a less obtrusive way in everyday situations. To get a feel for that, find yourself a nice long hallway, pick a spot about 50 feet away, and walk towards it with your eyes closed. If walking were a completely automatic program that could run without visual input from the brain, this would be no problem, yet most sighted people feel uneasy just a few steps in.

So if walking actually can’t run with total automaticity, why does treadmill walking show no attentional cost?

It may be that there is a cost, but it’s so small that it’s not detected in these experiments. And that may mean it’s not worth worrying about. Follow-up experiments with greater statistical power to detect small effects would be needed to address that possibility. Three other caveats are worth considering before we all buy treadmill desks.

First, the studies to date have been of relatively brief duration—less than an hour. It’s possible that subjects can with some effort of concentration, walk without cognitive cost for a short period of time, but a few hours would reveal a deficit; tiredness might make walking a little sloppy, and thus more attention-demanding.

Second, at least one study has shown a movement task (key tapping) was compromised when people walk (Oblinger et al, 2011). That’s not an effect of attention, but of trying to do two motor actions at once, like rubbing your stomach while patting your head. Hence, although office activities like typing or data entry have not been tested on treadmills, I’d be willing to bet they would be compromised. 

Third, my graduate mentor and Rousseau may have been talking about different types of thought. My mentor referred to answering a question, whereas Rousseau may have meant more creative thought. Walking may not be helpful when the environment presents pressing problems in need of timely answers. But a meandering gait may promote meandering thought, which in turn promotes creativity. The latter has not be tested on office treadmills either.
Dave Eckstrom
5/2/2016 11:26:50 am

I don't know what this means, but I am a cyclist who spends 200 - 300 hours per summer on the road, lots of it alone. I have noticed that I often have difficulty doing even the simplest cognitive tasks sometimes, like estimating when I will arrive at a checkpoint, even if I am not pushing hard. However, I have noticed that if I have a decision to make and I'm struggling with making sense of the pros and cons, a 2 or 3 hour ride where I'm thinking about the decision will often bring clarity.

Michael Hubenthal
5/2/2016 05:29:14 pm

Interesting. As an avid runner I concur with Dave. I find simple math problems, like working out splits, difficult while running (inside or out). However, other types of thinking (decision making, planning a talk or thinking through sections of a paper) are seem to be no more effort and perhaps more efficient while running as I don't have other distractions. I have always assumed there are issues of attention involved as well as cognition.

Justin Baeder link
5/2/2016 06:24:13 pm

Dan, thanks for a nuanced and honest review of this research—hadn't come across it before, but I use a treadmill desk so I was very interested to see your post.

I usually walk about 1MPH, and while I find that it doesn't impact my thinking, it does have the following effects:
1. A slight decrease in my typing accuracy—owing to the mechanics of movement. I don't have a separate wrist rest—just my laptop.

2. A marked increase in focus, especially in getting to the bottom of my inbox. This, for me, is the main benefit—instead of falling into an afternoon multi-tasking funk, I can stay focused and finish what would otherwise be a fairly boring task from which I'd try to distract myself.

Steven Wise
5/3/2016 07:19:40 am

"locomotion (like all movement) requires close monitoring of perceptual feedback (from vision, from balance) which is used to fine-tune ..."

I don't think so, Dan, if what you mean by "perceptual feedback" implies awareness of the sensory input. Autopilot control of reaching, for example, uses vision (and proprioception) to adjust movement, but people remain unaware of what has actually happened to the goal of the reaching movement. The same applies to locomotion: sometimes it requires attentive control and sometimes it doesn't. When Rousseau was wandering around and thinking, he probably wasn't attempting to reach any particular goal. (I do realize that perception is often used in the way you have. There are, for example, as series of edited volumes on "perception and action", but this is a different meaning of 'perception' than the one that most people use. (By the way, in our upcoming book on The Evolution of Memory Systems, we advance some ideas about when vision-for-perception and vision-for-action arose during primate evolution.)

Daniel Willingham link
5/3/2016 09:22:03 am

Thanks Steve
Yeah, I made it sound as though one would be aware of perceptual feedback at all times, though that's clearly not the case....I think you'd agree that there would be times during walking that a correction would be sizable enough that it would demand attention...hence my comment that you might see greater cost when people have walked a while and are really pretty tired.


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