Presentation
HE20 - Take a Stand For Your Health! Examining Postural Effects on Attention
SessionPoster Session 2
DescriptionA recent trend in the workplace is to use standing desks and workstations, which are thought to improve productivity and cognitive processing (Straub et al., 2022). This trend of standing while working is not new to healthcare settings. Healthcare workers such as nurses, doctors, and surgeons stand for extended periods of time. In fact, Benzo et al. (2021) reported that nurses spend over half of their time on a 12-hour shift standing or walking. If standing leads to improved productivity and cognitive processing in office settings, then it could also lead to enhanced productivity and cognitive processing in healthcare settings where the costs of errors can be life-changing. It is therefore important to determine if posture (sitting versus standing) affects cognition. Initial research observed that standing improved selective attention, reducing the impact of distractors in basic cognitive tasks (Rosenbaum et al., 2017; 2018; Smith et al., 2019). However, multiple replication attempts have failed to find these same effects of posture on attention (Caron et al., 2020; Caron et al., 2022; Straub et al., 2022). Here, we examined whether the original demonstrations would replicate if there was increased ecological validity, in particular, if stronger manipulations of posture and search difficulty are used, based on the criticism that laboratory tasks seem to be much easier than real-world tasks where the effects of posture are reported (Bracht & Glass, 1968). Search difficulty was increased by increasing the number of distractors (Experiment 1) and by combining conjunction and variable-mapping search manipulations (Experiment 2) (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Treisman & Gelade, 1980). The difficulty of the posture manipulation was increased by having participants stand on a slant board (Experiment 3). Despite increasing the difficulty of the visual search task and the subjectively more difficult posture manipulation there was no evidence that posture affects selective attention. The present results add to the growing evidence that posture does not affect selective attention (e.g., Caron et al., 2020; 2022; Straub et al., 2022). This suggests that there are no cognitive benefits to standing that would offset the known health risks such as back pain, cardiovascular risks, etc. (Waters & Dick, 2015). This does not mean that ergonomics does not play any role in cognitive efficiency. For instance, evidence suggests that holding displays changes search efficiency (Abrams et al., 2008; Weidler & Abrams, 2013), therefore further research examining the relationship between ergonomics and cognitive efficiency needs to be explored in healthcare settings.
An important direction for future research will be to examine whether cognitive performance was not affected by standing, because postural control was sacrificed while performing the hard search conditions (performing hard cognitive tasks when standing could have made people clumsier). Therefore, there still could be cognitive effects when standing but without a posture measure, we cannot determine this. We recommend that future research should use methods that measure posture and attention performance in real time so that insights from dual-task studies (e.g., the PRP paradigm) can be used. As well, future studies should examine cognitive processes other than selective attention (e.g., sustained attention or working memory). Successful completion of complex tasks in healthcare settings requires a multitude of cognitive processes. Evidence that any of these cognitive processes are affected by posture would have important implications for healthcare workers such as lives being saved.
An important direction for future research will be to examine whether cognitive performance was not affected by standing, because postural control was sacrificed while performing the hard search conditions (performing hard cognitive tasks when standing could have made people clumsier). Therefore, there still could be cognitive effects when standing but without a posture measure, we cannot determine this. We recommend that future research should use methods that measure posture and attention performance in real time so that insights from dual-task studies (e.g., the PRP paradigm) can be used. As well, future studies should examine cognitive processes other than selective attention (e.g., sustained attention or working memory). Successful completion of complex tasks in healthcare settings requires a multitude of cognitive processes. Evidence that any of these cognitive processes are affected by posture would have important implications for healthcare workers such as lives being saved.
Event Type
Poster Presentation
TimeTuesday, April 14:45pm - 6:15pm EDT
LocationFrontenac Foyer