The Effects of an Eye-closure Technique on the Identification Accuracy from Photo Lineups

The purpose of this study was to determine if submaximal exercise resulted in increased levels of attention in young students. The participants were fourth grade students from a local elementary school. There were 27 total participants – 16 were in the exercise group, and 11 were in the control, or rest, group. Each student took two distractibility tests within an hour and a half. In between the preand post-tests, the experimental group participated in a small amount of aerobic physical activity, while the control group went to class as usual. Four paired t-tests were run to analyze the data. Each had an alpha value of 0.05. The distractibility test featured questions with both two and six distractors; the p-values for the control group with two, the control with six, the exercise group with two, and the exercise with six were respectively 0.0838, 0.0394, 0.1697, and 0.1570. As the only test to result in a significant improvement was the control group with six distractors, the research hypothesis that if elementary school students exercise before class, then their attention will greatly improve compared to those who did not was not supported. Oddly, while the exercise group did not have a significant amount of improvement, they maintained higher mean scores on the preand posttests for both types of questions in contrast to the rest group. Overall, exercise did not significantly improve the students’ attention levels. 1. Further research could examine the effects of multiple intensities of exercise in children. 2. The test should be administered by a familiar person, such as a teacher, because a stranger could cause distraction in the students. 3. The participants should practice the test multiple times before the experiment so their true attention levels can be scored. Future Research