Acute Cardiovascular Exercise on Proactive Memory Interference

Abstract

The present experiment evaluated the temporal effects of exercise on memory performance after an antecedent distractor. We aimed to evaluate if exercise could attenuate a proactive interference (PI) effect. The present study was a within-subject, counterbalanced, randomized controlled design. Participants completed four laboratory visits including (1) a control visit, (2) exercising (15-min brisk walking) prior to memory encoding, (3) exercising during memory encoding, and (4) exercising after memory encoding. The PI assessment included a word-list trial, including a competing stimuli trial (list A), followed by recall of a second word trial (list B), with performance on list B serving as the outcome measure. The visit that involved exercise occurring prior to the memory task had the highest number of words recalled for list B. Specifically, for the control, before, during, and after visits, respectively, the mean (SE) number of recalled words were 5.9 (0.4), 6.4 (0.3), 6.1 (0.5), and 5.8 (0.3). These differences, however, did not reach statistical significance. Acute exercise did not statistically attenuate proactive memory interference.