Hatha Yoga Increases Executive Control and Task Switching Efficiency: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Understanding conditions optimal for attention switching is of utmost importance. Switching attention between tasks or within tasks is part of the implementation and maintenance of executive control processes and plays an indispensable role in our daily lives: It allows us to perform on distinct tasks and with variable objects, enabling them to adapt to and respond in dynamically changing environments. Here, we tested if yoga could benefit switching of attention between distinct objects of one’s focus (e.g., through practicing switching attention between one’s own body, mind, feelings, and different postures) in particular and executive control in general. We therefore conducted a randomized controlled trial with 98 participants and a waitlisted control group. In the intervention group, healthy yoga novices practiced Hatha yoga three times a week, for eight weeks. At the electrophysiological level, frequency-tagging indicated no interventional effect on participants’ ability to switch between the auditory and visual modalities. However, increases in task-related frontocentral theta activity, resulting from the intervention, indicated an ability to increasingly deploy executive resources to the prioritized task when needed. At the behavioral level, our intervention resulted in the more efficient holding of target representations in working memory, indicated by decreased mixing costs. Again, however direct effects on switching were missing. We, thus, conclude that Hatha yoga has a positive influence on executive control functions but likely not directly on (or via) the switching function.