Methods
The study population comprised of both male and female undergraduate students currently enrolled at Clarkson University. Participants range in age from 18 to 23 years old. Half of the participants in the study get more than 10 hours of regular exercise a week and the remaining half comprise of students who do not exercise regularly. During these 10 hours, athletes undergo strenuous activity such as hill sprints and conditioning exercises. Having half the participants be on a sports team will allow us to analyze if athletes are better suited for cognitive tasks.
Two subsets of volunteer subjects participated in this study; students competing on a DIII sports team at Clarkson University and students not competing on a DIII sports team at Clarkson University. To reduce variability, only undergraduate students attending Clarkson University were studied. Students who are a member of a DIII sports team at Clarkson University are classified as the "athletes" group while students who are not a member of a sports team are classified as the "non-athlete" group. XX number of students participated in this study. Due to time constraints studying a larger population of students was not feasible. Using such a small set of participants may skew the data and this was taken into consideration when analyzing the data.
Procedure 1: ECG Recording
The study will be using an ECG to see the differences in electrical potential of the heart in athletes verse non-athletes. As athletes are used to physical activity, it is expected their ECG will be different than non-athletes. An ECG works by placing electrodes on the surface of the skin and connecting them to a monitor via wires. The skin of the participant is cleaned with an alcohol swab. Adhesive gel is applied to the areas where the electrodes will be placed. The adhesive gel allows for better conduction between the skin and electrodes and also helps the electrodes to stay in place throughout the ECG procedure.
The electrodes will be placed on the participate as shown in the figure below. In addition to recording ECG signals, this electrode placement will allow heart rate variability (HRV) to be calculated. HRV can be used as a metric to determine sympathetic input. This will allow stress levels of participants of each group to be measured during the cognitive task. Furthermore, this setup can be used to determine pulse rate, which will be explained in the following sectons.