Filomena Anelli, from the University of Bologna and her collaborators have carried out an experiment to analyze the effect that a motor activity such as walking , which involves the whole body, can have on the ability to perform simple arithmetic calculations such as addition and subtraction.
The study, recently published in Frontiers in Psychology (2014), had the collaboration of 52 participants. Various trials were done in which the experimenter and the participant walked together in a straight line for 20 seconds. Afterwards, the experimenter said a number (eg 434), indicated whether the participant should add or subtract from there, and also indicated the direction (left or right) in which he should continue walking for another 22 seconds while performing. calculations simultaneously.
The researchers hypothesized that there would be some congruence effect between the direction of movement requested when walking and the type of calculation to be performed . In this way, they suggested that the subtraction would be congruent with the movements to the left while the addition would be congruent with the movements to the right, and all this would be observed in the number of calculations performed simultaneously. And the analysis of the results showed this, since a greater number of arithmetic calculations were observed when the movements were congruent with the type of operation.
A greater number of additions were recorded when participants moved to the right (compared to walking to the left) and more subtractions were also performed when they walked to the left (compared to walking to the right).
This study follows the findings of other investigations in which a relationship has been observed between the processing of spatial information and numerical magnitude, as well as between the processing of numbers and the movements of the body . It seems clear that the brain will not cease to amaze us and that we still have a lot to find out about how it works and how it is influenced by the rest of the body.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
