Abstract
This study aims to identify the acute effects of physical exercise on specific cognitive functions immediately following an increase in cardiovascular activity. Stair-climbing exercise is used to increase the cardiovascular output of human subjects. The color-naming Stroop Test was used to identify the cognitive improvements in executive function with respect to processing speed and error rate. The study compared the Stroop results before and immediately after exercise and before and after nonexercise, as a control. The results show that there is a significant increase in processing speed and a reduction in errors immediately after less than 30 min of aerobic exercise. The improvements are greater for the incongruent than for the congruent color tests. This suggests that physical exercise induces a better performance in a task that requires resolving conflict (or interference) than a task that does not. There is no significant improvement for the nonexercise control trials. This demonstrates that an increase in cardiovascular activity has significant acute effects on improving the executive function that requires conflict resolution (for the incongruent color tests) immediately following aerobic exercise more than similar executive functions that do not require conflict resolution or involve the attention-inhibition process (for the congruent color tests).
Highlights
Physical exercise is known to improve brain functions based on a large body of evidence, ranging from the improvement in academic performance in children to the improvement in cognitive function in both healthy subjects and patients with mental disorders
Note that because of the individual differences in the resting heart rate, the breathing rate, and the time spent to complete the Stroop Test, it is important to use the percentage change as a metric to compare the difference between the pre- and posttests for the same subject, so that the results are not confounded by the individual differences
It showed that moderate aerobic exercise modulated the functioning of phasic alertness by increasing the general state of tonic vigilance [28], but aerobic exercise did not modulate the functioning of either the orienting or the executive control attentional networks. This may account for the dissimilar results based on other executive function tests, because these tests tap into the selective attention and orientation responses rather than into the conflict resolution process for interference. These results show that aerobic exercise can increase the processing speed in resolving conflicting interference and reduce the error rates that are related to the cardiovascular activity, without necessarily being confounded by any mental cognitive engagement while doing such exercise
Summary
Physical exercise is known to improve brain functions based on a large body of evidence, ranging from the improvement in academic performance in children to the improvement in cognitive function in both healthy subjects and patients with mental disorders. Treadmill exercise has been shown to enhance memory plasticity function in hippocampus through (brain-derived neurotrophic factors BDNF) upregulation (in rats), which is potentiated by antidepressant treatment [10] It reverses stress-induced changes by establishing functional reconnection of hippocampal synapses that is mediated by antidepressant actions [11]. Exercise can improve motor functions in Parkinson’s patients by enhancing motor circuitry connectivity based on the functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) brain imaging studies [13] These long-term effects of exercise on brain functions are well established in both children and adults, in physically fit and overweight individuals, in both healthy subjects and patients, and in individual trials and randomized-control trials [14]
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