Abstract
Objectives
To test the hypothesis that cognitive load (low vs. high load) during a 20 min self-paced cycling exercise affects physical performance.
Design
A pre-registered (https://osf.io/qept5/), randomized, within-subject design experiment.
Methods
28 trained and experienced male cyclists completed a 20 min self-paced cycling time-trial exercise in two separate sessions, corresponding to two working memory load conditions: 1-back or 2-back. We measured power output, heart rate, RPE and mental fatigue.
Results
Bayes analyses revealed extreme evidence for the 2-back task being more demanding than the 1-back task, both in terms of accuracy (BF10 = 4490) and reaction time (BF = 1316). The data only showed anecdotal evidence for the alternative hypothesis for the power output (BF10 = 1.52), moderate evidence for the null hypothesis for the heart rate (BF10 = 0.172), anecdotal evidence for RPE (BF10 = 0.72) and anecdotal evidence for mental fatigue (BF10 = 0.588).
Conclusions
Our data seem to challenge the idea that self-paced exercise is regulated by top-down processing, given that we did not show clear evidence of exercise impairment (at the physical, physiological and subjective levels) in the high cognitive load condition task with respect to the low working memory load condition. The involvement of top-down processing in self-pacing the physical effort, however, cannot be totally discarded. Factors like the duration of the physical and cognitive tasks, the potential influence of dual-tasking, and the participants’ level of expertise, should be taken into account in future attempts to investigate the role of top-down processing in self-paced exercise.
Citation: Holgado D, Zabala M, Sanabria D (2019) No evidence of the effect of cognitive load on self-paced cycling performance. PLoS ONE 14(5):
e0217825.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217825
Editor: Dominic Micklewright, University of Essex, UNITED KINGDOM
Received: March 5, 2019; Accepted: May 21, 2019; Published: May 31, 2019
Copyright: © 2019 Holgado et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All data can be found in Open Science framework platform: https://osf.io/qept5/.
Funding: This project was supported by grant PSI2016-75956-P from Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, awarded to DS and MZ, and grant FPU14/06229 from Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, awarded to DH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.