Annotated Bibliography

Cynthia Fernandez
Assignment 1
Jan 26, 2012

Stanley J. Colcombe, Arthur F. Kramer, Kirk I. Erickson, Paige Scalf, Edward McAuley, Neal J. Cohen,
Andrew Webb, Gerry J. Jerome, David X. Marquez, and Steriani Elavsky. (2004). Cardiovascular fitness, cortical plasticity, and aging, PNAS, Vol 101(9), 3316-3321

To begin, this articles starts off stating that “cardiovascular fitness is thought to offset declines in cognitive performance..” which gave me insight on what the article was about, along with the title. This article was mainly explaining two studies conducted to show whether cardiovascular fitness training had positive results in brain plasticity. The motivation came from prior research using animal models that showed aerobic training
Participants were also tested on their vision, and those that didn’t have 20/20 were given corrective lenses. The fitness assessment evaluated in this study was called the Rockport 1 mile walk test. A formula combining height, weight, heart rate, and time to complete the walk gave the final estimates of the maximal oxygen uptake (VO2). 15 of the participants performed in treadmill based assessments. According to the article, the fitness test was valid due to the correlation between the Rockport test and the treadmill VO2 scores. In another session in study 1, a flanker task was performed. Participants were asked to respond to the middle arrow in a row of arrows either pointing the same direction or opposite directions. Each was presented half the time. They were scanned with an echo planar imaging device. There were 145 images for each participant for each 5 min block. The outcome was percent increase in reaction time to incongruent stimuli over and above the average reaction time of congruent stimuli. This shows that the reaction time was unbiased from incongruent to congruent. Results for behavioral interference by the inconsistent flanking items show that high-fit adults are more efficient in dealing with conflicting cues with 18% interference and low-fit had 26%
I actually don’t even think I FULLY understand everything about it. I believe the wording of it is for more experienced individuals in the field of neuroscience. The actual concept though was quite simple and it’s amazing that there is technology to actually test the brain so studies like this can show us insight on helping our minds become better. The findings were convincing but sometimes seemed cut off, unless I just wasn’t fully understand their concepts and functions. I noted some things that could have been altered for the studies. Firstly, it was mentioned that there were prescreenings checking for dementia and psychiatric disability. When I read this I thought it made sense, but then I thought it might have been good for the researchers to include these people also but separate them into their own group. It might be possible to also increase their brain plasticity with cardio training. Further, I noticed that both studies had a different number of participants. The article made it seem they were trying to do all the fitness the same so I thought the number of people should be too. It could be those numbers came from their calculations, but I don’t know. Lastly, the studies had high-functioning participants and the article stated lower functioning individuals still needs to be studied. I believe they should have mixed these individuals to test the different outcomes or make certain