🎙️ For a breakdown of the key findings from both articles, listen to a 5-min podcast here (thanks to AI).
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Busch, N., Zinchenko, A., Halle, M., & Geyer, T. (2025). Withstand control: Standing posture differentially affects space-based and feature-based cognitive control through enhanced physiological arousal. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 26347.
Vollständiger Artikel: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-11692-6
Abstract: Can simply standing upright sharpen our minds? Whereas initial works proposed that standing posture reduces distractor interference in the Stroop task, subsequent replication attempts yielded mixed results. Importantly, previous studies mostly ignored individual fitness factors like BMI, physical activity level, and cardiac measures, which have recently been suggested to explain mixed findings. Here, we addressed these inconsistencies by controlling for such fitness characteristics in N = 36 healthy adults. Additionally, we expanded upon previous research by examining posture’s influence on previously unexplored space-based cognitive control using the Navon task. We found evidence against an effect of standing posture on Stroop interference, while, in contrast, standing posture significantly improved spatial conflict processing in the Navon task. Most importantly, this effect was fully mediated by enhanced physiological arousal as indexed by reduced HRV, directly supporting the proposed mechanism of how standing influences cognitive control through increased postural demands. Our findings challenge the idea of a unified attentional control system, revealing that posture differentially influences conflict processing depending on its task-specific nature. These insights may advance theoretical understanding and have practical implications: in increasingly sedentary societies, simple changes like standing could selectively enhance certain cognitive functions, improving effective work and learning environments.
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Zinchenko, A., Busch, N., Dodwell, G., & Geyer, T. (2025). Withstand context: Standing posture improves contextual cueing in challenging visual search. Psychophysiology, 62(7), e70108.
Vollständiger Artikel: https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70108
Abstract: Humans can learn to use repeated spatial arrangements of irrelevant, non-target items to direct the focus of attention towards behaviorally relevant—target—items, a phenomenon known as contextual cueing (CC). However, whether CC is itself dependent on attentional resources is a controversial issue. Here, we used visual search to test how CC is affected when attention varies through two types of manipulations: perceptual load (as induced by target-distractor similarity) and postural load (sitting vs. standing). For easy searches (low target-distractor similarity), we observed reliable facilitation of search in repeated-context displays, which was independent of participants' body posture. For difficult searches (high target-distractor similarity), contextual facilitation was evident only with standing posture. Posture-related benefits remained significant even after controlling for heart rate variability (HRV), body mass index, and physical activity. Decomposing aggregated reaction times by drift-diffusion modeling revealed that CC in difficult searches decreased the amount of evidence required for target-response decisions. Our results suggest that statistical learning is effectively supplemented during standing posture when visual search is challenging, possibly because posture manipulation and contextual manipulation affect common response-selection stages of processing.