Short Term Effect of Physical Exercise on Selective Attention using Eeg and Stroop Task

This paper aims to investigate the short-term effect of physical exercise on Selective Attention for university students. Selective attention allows the participant to focus on essential details ignoring the other trivial information. Stroop task is a test widely used to study Selective Attention. EEG waves are very closely related to attention and can help investigate the effect of physical exercise on attention. We propose a methodology to investigate High-Intensity interval (HIIT) Exercise (Tabata routine) on Selective Attention on university students. We prove that Response time statistically after the Post-HIIT Stroop Task is significantly less than that of the pre-HIIT Stroop Task. We analyze the pre-HIIT Stroop test EEG data and post-HIIT Stroop test EEG data to get insights using EEG time-domain features: mean, variance, kurtosis, skewness, Shannon entropy, and total power. We observe that the post-HIIT variance for all channels and total power for the Fpz channel is higher, while pre-HIIT Shannon Entropy for all channels is higher for all 10 participants. Results indicate that exercise has a positive impact on stimulating the brain. Hence it impacts selective attention, as also indicated by the statistical analysis from the Stroop test results.