ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Movement Science
This article is part of the Research TopicHarnessing Physical Activity for Cognitive Enhancement and Mental Health PromotionView all 10 articles
Long-term mind-body exercise enhances cognitive control over working memory-driven attentional capture
Provisionally accepted
- 1Soochow University, Suzhou, China
- 2Jiangsu Urban and Rural Construction Vocational College, Changzhou, China
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Internal representations in working memory (WM) automatically bias attention toward matching stimuli, a process termed WM-driven attentional capture that is modulated by cognitive control. Although previous studies have found that mind-body exercise has a promoting effect on cognitive control, the effect of mind-body exercise on resistance to proactive interference from working memory has yet to be investigated. The present study used the classic WM/visual search dual-task paradigm to investigate the effects of baduanjin mind-body exercise on WM-driven attentional capture. Sixty-seven healthy college students were randomly allocated to a training group or a control group. The training group underwent 16 weeks of baduanjin intervention at a frequency of 3 days/week for 60 minutes/session. The results showed that mind-body exercise significantly reduced reaction times (RTs) in both visual search and WM tasks. More importantly, the training group showed a significant reduction in WM-driven attentional capture during the posttest phase compared with the same measure during the pretest phase. However, the control group showed no such improvement. These results indicated that mind-body exercise could modulate WM-driven attentional capture, potentially attributable to strengthened top-down cognitive control and optimized allocation of attentional resources. The present study provides preliminary evidence that long-term mind-body exercise improves the young individuals' ability to resist proactive interference at the memory level, enriching our understanding of the association between exercise and distractor suppression.
Keywords: Attentional guidance, cognitive control, Distractor suppression, mind-body exercise, working memory
Received: 24 Dec 2025; Accepted: 16 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Cai, Liu, Jiang and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zonghao Zhang
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