Effects of Differing Exercise Intensities on the Response Time of Gymnasts and Nongymnasts in a Mental Body Rotation Task SALMA KHALFALLAH and BESSEM MKAOUER Manouba University SAMIHA AMARA Sultan Qaboos University HAMDI HABACHA Université de Paris, CNRS, Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center NIZAR SOUISSI National Sport Observatory The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of different levels of exercise in- tensity on mental rotation performance in gymnasts versus nongymnasts. A group of elite gym- nasts and a group of nongymnasts performed a mental body rotation task at rest and then performed the same task preceded by short bouts of intense exercise at 60%, 80%, 100%, and 120% of their maximum aerobic speed. The analyses of response times showed that gymnasts performed the mental rotation task faster after bouts of intense exercise than in rest condition, but nongymnasts performed equally in rest and after exercise. This fnding highlights the specifc physical expertise as a variable that can affect the infuence of exercise on cognitive processing. KEYWORDS: mental rotation, cognitive processing, exercise intensity, gymnastic expertise To improve sport performance, researchers and practitioners are continuously aiming to improve movement execution and efciency. In addition to physical training on a movement, understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying movement plays a key role on its improvement. This is particularly true given the functional equivalence between actual and imagined movements (for a review see Decety, 2002). Imagining a movement seems to preserve the spatial and temporal characteristics (Guillot & Collet, 2005) and to be based on the same cognitive and neu- ral systems (Decety, 1996; Jeannerod & Frak, 1999; O’Craven & Kanwisher, 2000; Thomas, 1999) of the actual movement. One form of mental imagery that clearly translates the equivalence between overt and covert execution is mental rotation, a framework frst introduced by Shepard and Metzler (1971). In their seminal study, Shepard and Metzler recorded response time (RT) of participants judging whether two misoriented American Journal of Psychology Spring 2022, Vol. 135, No. 1 pp. 69–76 • © 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/ajp/article-pdf/135/1/69/1490105/69khalfallah.pdf by guest on 16 March 2022