Exercising for 12 minutes a day can be a cost-effective way for low-income adolescents to boost their attention and reading comprehension abilities, a new study finds.
Low-Income adolescents are always on the lookout for cost effective ways to maintain good physical and mental health. Researchers from Dartmouth College found that such individuals can engage in 12 minutes of exercise daily to improve attention and reading comprehension.
Selective visual attention is a measurement used to evaluate a person's attention span. It is the ability to remain visually focused on something despite distractions. For the study, researchers compared low-income adolescents with their high-income peers. Even 45 minutes after exercising, both groups experienced a significant improvement in selective visual attention, though the improvement was higher in low-income participants. Additionally, while exercising also helped improve reading comprehension abilities in participants from the low-income group, no such observation was made among participants from the high income group.
Explaining the phenomenon, researchers said that this occurrence could be because both groups respond differently to exercise, depending on the level of stress they experience in life.
"Low-income individuals experience more stress than high-income individuals, and stress impacts the same physiological systems that acute aerobic exercise activates," study author Michele Tine said in a press statement. "Physiological measures were beyond the scope of this study, but low-income participants did report experiencing more stress. Alternatively, it is possible that low-income individuals improved more simply because they had more room to improve."
The researchers didn't clarify the intensity or type of exercises individuals should indulge in to reap maximum benefits.
Tine and his team conducted a similar study in 2012 where they found that brief aerobic exercise improved selective visual attention among children, especially in those coming from low-income families.
This is the first study that looks into not only how exercise affects attention and reading comprehension abilities but how income can play a major role in these abilities. Findings were published online in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
