Subliminal Cues From Smart Glasses Boost Athletic Performance
IEEE Spectrum has the story on a potential use for smart glasses as performance enhancing sportswear, following some promising research results.
New research suggests that subliminal cues shown on visual displays can give a significant boost to human performance during endurance exercises.
The small study by researchers at Kent University and Bangor University in the UK may be the first to show that subliminal visual cues—words, pictures, and symbols—can have have an impact on human performance during exercise. Study participants saw the words or small faces used to “prime” their performance appear on a digital screen for less than 0.02 seconds with masking visuals that prevented them from consciously identifying the cues, according to a press release.
One of the study’s experiments showed happy or sad faces to 13 athletes cycling to the point of exhaustion. Those athletes who were exposed to the happy faces ended up cycling almost three minutes longer on average than those exposed to the sad faces.
A second experiment found that “action” words could also prime athletes for better performance compared with “inaction” words on a similar endurance test—an increase in endurance time of six minutes and 39 seconds. Unlike the first experiment, the second experiment used a single subject design that had each individual serve as his or her own control.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython 8.1.0 and 8.2.0-beta0 out and so much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
