Understanding how exposure to a cold environment can decrease motor function can be applied to recognizing safety hazards for workers in a cold environment and to different conditions in a clinical setting. It was expected that throughout the control group there would be little to no variation within the tested parameters since they are not being exposed to cold water. There was a slight increase in the systolic blood pressure while the diastolic blood pressure decreased slightly. The heart rate, grip strength, and reaction time decreased on average. The slight decrease in average grip strength for the control could have been due to muscle fatigue. Because the grip strength was re-tested only three minutes between the baseline and post-exposure to the control stimulus, the muscles may have still been fatigued from the previous exercise.
The data collected revealed that there was no significant difference between the reaction time of the subject before and after the cold stimulus. Based on the data the hypothesis that cold exposure would significantly decrease motor function was rejected. This could be because only the arm was subjected to the cold temperature, an isolated section of the body, instead of the whole body which would elicit a stronger response. The blood pressure would likely increase more due to a greater amount of vasoconstriction throughout the entire body, rather than a localized area of the body. The heart rate would also slow down more if the whole body were exposed to a cold environment to reduce the amount of peripheral blood flow, allowing for the central, core organs to receive adequate blood supply during the cold temperature. If the subject's entire body was submerged in cold water, the results could have changed from the data collected in this experiment, allowing for more definite conclusions to be made.
Limitations and Strengths
This experiment had some limitations that lead to error in results and rejected the hypothesis. One limitation was how the subject only submerged elbow deep into ice water. The goal of this experiment was to find the effects of cold temperature on the body, however, what was actually tested was just a centralized area of the body. There was also a limitation to the accuracy of the equipment used. The equipment malfunction could have lead to some error in data results. The equipment at times would not work or would drift from baseline. The pulse transducer would often show the volunteer's heart rate spiking to over 500 bpm. The analysis could be more accurate with more participants, however, this experiment was limited in participants due to time constraints.
This experiment had strengths that could be brought to further experiments. This experiment had a diverse group with equal amounts of men and women between 18-22 years old. This experiment also allowed for the simulation of cold exposure in a laboratory setting.