The Order Effect of Acute Concurrent Exercise on Executive Function: An Event-Related Potential Study

The Stroop task consists of neutral, congruent, and incongruent trials. In neutral trials, colored rectangles were presented and participants were instructed to respond to whether the squares were red, blue, or green. For congruent and incongruent trials, participants were presented with the names of the three Chinese color words of 紅 (red), 藍 (blue), or 綠 (green) printed in either the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) ink color and instructed to respond to the color of the ink while inhibiting the meaning of the word.

The shifting aspect of executive function was assessed by means of a computer version of the task-switching test. In brief, each participant was presented with six blocks of 64 trials. For the first block, the participant was required to identify whether the stimulus (i.e., digits 1-9, without digit 5) within the solid-line square was greater/less than the digit 5. For the second block, the participant identified whether the stimulus within the dotted-line square was even/odd. The blocks 3-6 consisted of an equal number of stimuli from the first and second blocks forming an alternating-runs paradigm.

The lactic acid system is one of the important systems of human energy metabolism. In addition to supplying energy to muscles, it can also be used as an energy source for brain energy metabolism. When people doing exercise, the concentration of blood lactate will be increased, and the lactate acid system will replace the glucose system as the main energy source for the brain. In the present study, blood lactate were collected from fingertip with a lancet and measured by lactate analyzer before, 17 minutes after, and after intervention.