Skill & expertise
Does walking in high heels hurt your thinking, and does practice help?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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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Key findings
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).
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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