This study aims at comparing the effects of the Baduanjin mind-body (BMB) intervention with a conventional relaxation training program on enhancing the executive function. The study also attempts to explore the neural substrates underlying the cognitive effect of BMB intervention using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technique. Forty-two healthy college students were randomly allocated into either the Baduanjin intervention group or relaxation training (control) group. Training lasted for 8 weeks (90 min/day, 5 days/week). Each participant was administered the shortened Profile of Mood States to evaluate their mood status and the flanker task to evaluate executive function before and after training. While performing the flanker task, the NIRS data were collected from each participant. After training, individuals who have participated in BMB exercise showed a significant reduction in depressive mood compared with the same measure before the intervention. However, participants in the control group showed no such reduction. The before vs. after measurement difference in the flanker task incongruent trails was significant only for the Baduanjin intervention group. Interestingly, an increase in oxygenated hemoglobin in the left prefrontal cortex was observed during the Incongruent Trails test only after the BMB exercise intervention. These findings implicate that Baduanjin is an effective and easy-to-administering mind-body exercise for improving executive function and perhaps brain self-regulation in a young and healthy population.

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Serial order information is critical in our daily life, as in recalling a phone number, producing a sequence of phonemes when saying a word out loud, or writing down a sequence of letters when spelling. In the current study, we use a multiple case study approach to investigate the extent to which a common serial order system is shared in these daily activities. Three individuals with brain damage due to stroke completed a series of working memory (WM) tasks in both verbal and nonverbal (visuospatial) domains to assess whether they had a WM impairment specific to the capacity to maintain serial order. In addition, participants were administered a series of spoken production and spelling tasks, and the error corpus produced by these three individuals was analyzed to assess whether there was a tendency to produce the correct phonemes/letters in the wrong order. M.B. showed a serial order impairment with verbal but not visuospatial stimuli in WM tasks, whereas the other two participants did not exhibit any serial order impairment in either domain. This dissociation between verbal and nonverbal serial order WM systems provides clear evidence for the domain-specific nature of serial order WM. In both spoken and written production tasks, M.B. had a tendency to make errors that involved producing serial order errors, or errors in which the right segments were produced in the wrong order, whereas the other two participants did not produce serial order errors at rates different than would be expected by chance. The association between M.B.’s serial order impairments in verbal WM, spoken production, and spelling, along with the other two patients’ preserved serial order performance, supports a shared system for processing serial order information in verbal WM and language production.

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