The Effect of Increased Heart Rate on Memory and Performance of a Motor Sequence

This study was conducted to assess how an elevated heart rate affected an adolescent female’s ability to adapt a learned motor sequence. Participants (N=32) mastered a basketball dribbling sequence and then the test group raised their heart rate. All participants were then asked to make modifications to the original sequence through verbal cues and to perform the new sequence.Results indicate that cardiovascular fatigue could impact the athletes’ ability to adapt learned motor sequences possibly because fatigue may limit the capacity to successful encode the actionintent- cue or recognize the already memorized cue.