Effects of Habitual Physical Activity Level (PAL) on Simple Visual and Auditory Reaction Time in Healthy Indian Adults

Aim To find the correlation between physical activity level(PAL) and simple visual and auditory reaction time(SVRT and SART), which are tests for cognition .

Material and Method: One hundred(100) healthy volunteers of both the genders(males 52 and females 48), aged between 18 and 50 years were recruited. Reaction time (RT), is defined the elapsed time between the presentation of a stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response to occur. Subjects were presented with red light for VRT and pure tone sound stimuli for ART. Reaction time is a measure of the coordination between the sensory and motor system occurs. The physical activity level (PAL) was determined by administering a physical activity level questionnaire developed by the Division of Nutrition, St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore. The PAL of an individual classified as follows: sedentary<1.4 moderately active 1.55 to 1.75, and heavily active .1.75.

Result: Statistical analysis of data was done by one-way ANOVA with Post-hoc by Turkey HSD test. The results were found to be significant. There is a negative correlation between the SVRT and PAL with R² value of 0.006; SART and PAL with R² value of 0.001 .

Conclusion: In this study we observed that when there is increase in the PAL, there is significantly faster ART and VRT. Therefore, more physically active individuals have better reaction times and are more coordinated at motor tasks when compared to less physically active.