| Summary: | 博士 === 國立體育大學 === 競技與教練科學研究所 === 108 === There have been international efforts to promote an active and healthy lifestyle for the older population in order to keep medical costs low as well as maintain quality of life in the elderly. Physical as well as cognitive factors are important in this light. Attention is one of the key-functions in cognition. In recent years Tai Chi Chuan (TCC) has become popular among older adults, since it is a low cost, slow kind of exercise for body and mind. We assumed that in a sport scientific point of view TCC consists of three major parts: coordinative, cardiovascular and meditative. Therefore the purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of an acute bout of TCC, bicycle ergometer, coordination session and meditation practice on attention in older TCC practitioners. 12 older male adults (M=69.4 ±3.8 years), five with two years of TCC experience and seven with more than five years of experience participated in the study. All participants had to undergo four exercise sessions [TCC (T), Coordination (C), Bicycle (B) and Meditation practice (M)]. The exercise sessions were counterbalanced and lasted for 30 minutes each. Before and after exercise sessions participants had to do a 14-minute long CPT test. Results show that attention improved after TCC in the commission mistakes value and Hit RT and missed significance level marginally with p=0.06 and p= 0.09 respectively. Detectability value, a measure for attentiveness, improved significantly with p=0.01. Hit RT value and Hit RT SD improved significantly after coordination with p=0.026 and p=0.002 respectively. The commission mistakes improved significantly after bicycle ergometer with p=0.031. However, a tendency for worse response time consistency (Variability value) with p=0.069 was found. Meditative practice did not show any improvement. Additionally, more experienced TCC practitioners showed a tendency for better vigilance. The four exercise programs did only differ significantly in the Hit RT value. Coordination significantly differed from mediation practice and Bicycle ergometer session, whereas TCC significantly differed from meditative practice and showed a tendency to differ from bicycle ergometer session. TCC and coordination session did not differ from each other. It seems that acute bouts of different exercises enhance different areas of attention; therefore it seems important to study different kinds of exercise and their effect on attention.
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