Does walking in high heels hurt your thinking, and does practice help?
Walking in high heels did not reduce working-memory performance for either experienced or inexperienced wearers, but experienced wearers adjusted their gait more flexibly under mental load.
Source
Thinking while walking: experienced high-heel walkers flexibly adjust their gait
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject dual-task experiment (shoe type x cognitive load) with a between-subject expertise factor (experts vs novices).
- N
- N=48 · 48 women aged 40-50: 24 frequent high-heel wearers (experts) and 24 who rarely wore them (novices).
- Population
- Middle-aged women in Berlin, Germany, differing in high-heel experience.
- Outcome
- 3-back working-memory accuracy (sitting vs walking) and variability of gait parameters on a treadmill.
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What they did
Women who wore high heels very often and women who hardly ever did walked on a treadmill in high heels and, in a separate session, in gym shoes. They walked with and without a demanding 3-back working-memory task (spotting digits that matched the one heard three items earlier), and also did the memory task while sitting. Motion capture of markers on the shoes measured how variable their stride time, stride length, cadence, single-leg support time and speed were.
What they found
Contrary to predictions, memory performance was no worse while walking than sitting, in either shoe type, and experts did not outperform novices. Gait results were mixed: speed became less variable under cognitive load, cadence was more variable in heels, and novices were more variable in heels than gym shoes for single-support time. The most consistent pattern was a three-way interaction: under load, experts reduced their variability in heels (single-support time) but became more variable in gym shoes (stride time and cadence).
The limits
What it doesn't show
Expertise was not randomly assigned, so experts and novices might differ in other ways, although they were matched on age, speed and cognitive tests. The heels were modest and wide, walkers chose their own speed, and there were no obstacles, so the task may have been too easy to reveal cognitive costs. Leg markers failed and only shoe markers were analysed, and the gait effects were inconsistent across parameters, so they should be treated cautiously.
Key terms
- Dual-task paradigm
- Doing two tasks at once to see whether they compete for limited attention, shown by worse performance than when each is done alone.
- Automaticity
- The idea that well-practised skills need little conscious attention, freeing resources for other tasks.
- N-back task
- A working-memory task in which people signal when the current item matches the one presented n steps earlier.
- Coefficient of variation
- Standard deviation divided by the mean; here used as an index of how irregular, and so how unstable, a person's gait is.
- Single-support phase
- The part of the walking cycle when the body is balanced on one leg.
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Quiz yourself
What was the cognitive task used in this study?
Common questions
Why did the authors expect experts to think better while walking in heels?
Motor-learning theories say practice makes a skill automatic, so experts should need less attention for heel-walking and have more left for the memory task.
Is lower gait variability always better?
Usually it signals steadier, safer walking, which is why experts reducing variability in heels under load was seen as adaptive; increased variability in gym shoes was considered less risky.
Why might no cognitive cost have appeared?
Walking is highly automatic, the heels were fairly stable, speed was self-chosen and there were no obstacles, so the motor task may not have drawn on much attention.
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