James Mccarron presents his doctoral research at ISSSMC

James MccarronIn August PESP group member and PhD student James Mccarron attended and presented part of his doctoral research at ISSSMC held at Northumbria University. This is one of the upcoming and most well respected conferences within the area. The title of his poster presentation was “Brain Drain: the impact of cognitive load on self-paced endurance running”. This research was novel as no study before has used a cognitive task throughout the entire duration of the bout of exercise used. In addition, no study has assessed the impact of such cognitive load on exercise performance which in this case was self-paced 5km run. The greater the cognitive load, i.e. use of neural processes mediated via prefrontal regions, the worse the performance in a 5km. In addition, there appears to be a draining effect on prefrontal dependent cognition throughout the 5km run. This may be due to a reduced amount of resources in this area of the brain or a competition between cognitive task performance and the execution of self-paced running. This has important theoretical and applied application to endurance exercise performance.

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