When the Body Plays, Who Is Doing the Work: The Muscles or Attention?

Does better performance necessarily mean greater brain activation? Or could the key lie in the precise moments when the organism mobilizes its repertoires to act, correct, and learn?

Mobile EEG · Frontal Theta · Beta Bursts · High Performance · Rock–Paper–Scissors · Connectomic Reserve · Metanoia

Imagine two people playing a game in front of a screen. Small animals appear on a virtual floor. To score points, players must move their feet, recognize targets, and avoid certain movements.

One person responds quickly. Another observes, hesitates, and decides carefully. A third, more experienced player anticipates what will happen and makes almost imperceptible corrections.

Who is working harder? Who is paying more attention? And who has the greater capacity to learn?

Does high performance depend on the amount of brain activity or on how precisely the organism mobilizes its available repertoires?

In October 2026, Nina Skjæret-Maroni, Helen Müller, Phillip Anders, Karoline Blix Grønvik, Jochen Baumeister, Beatrix Vereijken, and Ellen Marie Bardal published Movement and Frontal Theta Activity During Step-Based Exergaming in Healthy Younger and Older Adults in JMIR Formative Research.

Their investigation examined relationships between body movement, frontal electrical activity, and performance during movement-based games.

1. Playing involves more than moving muscles

Exergames combine video games and physical activity and are investigated in exercise and rehabilitation contexts.

During gameplay, participants recognize stimuli, anticipate events, select responses, and coordinate movements.

However, scores, physical effort, and cognitive control are not equivalent.

An experienced player may perform precise movements with relative ease. Another participant may require greater deliberation to complete the same task.

A score tells us about the outcome, but it does not fully explain how the organism achieved it.

2. How did the researchers design the experiment?

The study included 32 healthy adults: 16 younger participants, with a mean age of 25 years, and 16 older adults, averaging 76.5 years.

Everyone played The Mole, a game with three difficulty levels.

At the easy level, participants stepped on moles. At the intermediate level, they also had to reach moving mice. At the difficult level, they needed to avoid ladybugs that caused point deductions.

Each participant completed two five-minute trials per difficulty level, with the first serving as familiarization.

The researchers recorded body movements through accelerometry and brain activity using mobile EEG, with Brain Products MOVE, actiCHamp, and actiCAP equipment in a 64-channel configuration.

Their analysis focused on frontal theta power, between 4 and 7 Hz, used as an indirect indicator of cognitive-control demands.

3. Did greater difficulty mean more movement?

Younger participants achieved higher scores at every difficulty level.

At the easy level, their average was approximately 175 points, compared with 142 among older adults. At the difficult level, the averages decreased to 158 and 108 points, respectively.

Interestingly, total movement also decreased as difficulty increased.

Body acceleration magnitude showed strong positive correlations with game scores, approximately 0.67 to 0.80.

However, step counts showed less consistent relationships.

This suggests that movement quantity and movement dynamics represent different aspects of performance.

It also does not demonstrate that older adults have less capacity to learn. Strategies, mobility, and previous experience may contribute to the observed differences.

4. Did more frontal theta mean better performance?

Frontal theta activity is frequently associated with cognitive control, but it is not a universal measure of attention.

The researchers found no statistically significant differences in average theta power across difficulty levels or age groups.

Among younger adults, correlations between theta and scores were close to zero.

Among older adults, some correlations were positive, reaching 0.76 at the difficult level, but none remained significant after correction for multiple comparisons.

The electrophysiological analysis included only 21 participants with suitable frontal components.

Therefore, these results do not demonstrate an absence of cognitive effort.

They show that average frontal theta power did not consistently explain game scores in this experiment.

But does an average adequately represent the decisive moments of brain activity?

5. When averages hide what matters

Imagine an experienced participant performing familiar movements and displaying brief episodes of cognitive control when a trajectory needs correction.

Another participant may require more continuous monitoring.

Both could show similar average activity despite using different strategies.

This possibility connects the experiment to a discovery discussed in Blog 03.

In Functional heterogeneity of beta bursts in childhood reveals a dimensional neural signature of motor skill, Holly Rayson and colleagues (2026) showed that global measures of beta activity did not adequately distinguish the groups of children they investigated.

However, specific beta-burst characteristics were associated with motor abilities.

Another investigation, Beta burst dynamics in the motor cortex are reshaped through sensorimotor refinement, by Kate Schipper and colleagues (2026), identified changes in the temporal organization of beta events during sensorimotor learning.

These studies do not demonstrate that theta and beta share identical mechanisms.

But they offer an important methodological lesson: temporal organization may reveal differences that disappear when brain activity is reduced to global averages.

6. Attention may emerge at moments of correction

Imagine a ladybug suddenly appearing.

The player must recognize the danger, interrupt a movement, and select another action.

This episode may require additional cognitive control, even though it occupies only a small fraction of the task.

A future analysis could investigate when theta episodes occur, how long they last, and how they relate to decisions, errors, and corrections.

It would also be possible to compare their organization before and after practice.

Skjæret-Maroni and colleagues did not perform this specific event-based temporal analysis. Their findings nevertheless justify asking the question.

Perhaps participants differ not only in their average activity levels, but also in when particular processes are recruited.

7. Rock can also represent high performance

At BrainLatam, we use Rock, Scissors, and Paper as metaphors for different functional modes.

Rock represents embodied repertoires. Scissors approaches deliberate analysis. Paper represents possibilities for enjoyment, flow, and metacognition.

These are not three anatomically distinct connectomes.

In The Network Watches You While Teaching You How to Look, we discuss how experience changes what we are able to perceive and perform.

Rock does not mean the absence of learning.

An experienced pianist continues refining finger pressure. An athlete subtly adjusts posture. A player improves the timing of each movement.

High performance can involve accumulated small corrections within a specialized repertoire.

The experimental question is whether these refinements correspond to changes in the temporal organization of neural processes involved in motor control.

8. Faith, local optima, and the freedom to make mistakes

From BrainLatam's perspective, faith can also represent confidence developed through repeated experiences of doing.

This confidence supports the execution of familiar repertoires but may limit alternatives when conditions change.

In Blind Faith and High Performance as a Local Optimum, we discuss how an effective solution can continue to be refined without necessarily encouraging the exploration of other possibilities.

Imagine two participants with similar abilities.

One can experiment without penalties. The other loses points whenever a mistake occurs.

Would they develop different strategies?

An experiment could compare safe exploration, penalties, and autonomy while recording EEG, movement, errors, and subjective confidence.

The original study did not investigate psychological safety or faith. These are new research questions proposed by BrainLatam.

9. Connectomic Reserve and Metanoia of the Metastable Brain

The hypothesis developed by Roberto Lent, Fernanda Tovar-Moll, and Diego Szczupak in The secret connections of the brain: a connectomic reserve for neuroplasticity? considers pre-existing anatomical connections potentially available for neural reorganization.

This raises another question: could individual differences in network organization influence the ability to refine familiar movements or explore new strategies?

However, the exergaming study did not measure Connectomic Reserve.

Metanoia of the Metastable Brain adds a hypothesis: successive encounters may modify an organism's repertoires and future possibilities for transitioning between states.

An A→B→A sequence could compare performance, EEG temporal organization, and strategies before, during, and after a different experience.

Persistent changes would need to be demonstrated rather than assumed.

10. Body-Territory: who defines performance?

A decolonial neuroscience also asks which bodily experiences, learning opportunities, and environmental conditions contribute to experimental outcomes.

Younger and older adults do not enter the laboratory with identical histories.

A lower score does not, by itself, demonstrate a lower potential for learning.

The Body-Territory perspective broadens our attention to the organism that perceives, moves, and learns in relation to its environment.

The contribution of Skjæret-Maroni and colleagues remains clear: in this particular game, scores were more directly associated with movement quantity than with average frontal theta power.

BrainLatam proposes investigating an additional dimension:

Does high performance depend on the amount of brain activity, or on the ability to mobilize repertoires, correct small movements, and recognize when another strategy needs to be explored?

Perhaps understanding effort requires observing not merely how much the brain works, but when, how, and toward which goals its activity becomes reorganized.

In Blog 07, we will investigate what happens between learning, retrieving a memory, and learning again.

Meta description: A 2026 EEG study explores frontal theta and motor performance. Discover how beta bursts, experience, timing, and high performance open new questions about learning.

Scientific note: Skjæret-Maroni and colleagues' experimental findings are distinguished from BrainLatam's proposed interpretations involving Rock–Paper–Scissors, confidence, safe exploration, Connectomic Reserve, and Metanoia of the Metastable Brain.

BRAINLATAM | W47/2026 | BLOG 06/12 — ENGLISH VERSION