中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: The behavioral and electrophysiological performance of highly physically active female elderly adults who regularly engage in table tennis was compared with their low physically active counterparts on a delayed and non-delayed visuospatial working memory task. Methods: We recruited 24 elderly female adults with normal cognitive function and a high/low physically active state based on a screening using the Mini-Mental State Examination and a 7-day physical activity recall questionnaire. Both groups participated in a delayed and non-delayed visuospatial working memory task while their behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) indices were simultaneously recorded. Results: Faster response time and better response accuracy were evident for the high physically active group than the control one. In terms of ERPs data, the physically active group exhibited larger P3 amplitude and faster P3 latency at Pz in the encoding stage. In addition, in the response stage, smaller N2 and larger P3 amplitude were observed for the high physically active group, but no significant difference was found on the P3 latency and CNV amplitude. Conclusions: Better visuospatial working memory performance was observed for the high physically active group. The neural mechanisms might be that the high physically active group could encode more quickly and allocate more attention resources when encoding. In addition, the high physically active group could reduce the effort in task-related response conflict or monitoring, and increase efficiency when they executed a response. Our findings suggest that better performance on visuospatial working memory tasks can be observed in female elderly adults regularly engaging in table tennis via enhanced central nervous system function.