Abstract
Chronic aerobic exercise is being established as a way to enhance executive functions and prevent cognitive decline. In the current study, we are aiming to investigate whether chronic aerobic exercise would also modulate long-term memory retrieval under the context of the Retrieval Practice Paradigm. According to Anderson et al. (1994), the retrieval of relevant information may decrease the access to other related information inducing the failure to remember or forgetting Interestingly, it has been shown (Román et al., 2009) that this process is mediated by the level of attentional resources. In order to test if chronic aerobic exercise benefits attentional resources, we have applied the Dual Retrieval Practice Task. The purpose of this task is to evaluate the Retrieval Induced Forgetting (RIF) effect, which is supposed to index adaptive forgetting. More specifically, the Dual Retrieval Practice Task assesses the effects of memory retrieval on forgetting information directly related to the information that has been previously retrieved, but also studies the involvement of attentional resources on this type of forgetting (retrieval induced forgetting). This task alternates memory retrieval practice with an updating task in order to load attentional resources. Two groups of physically active and sedentary young participants were evaluated. The results showed that while active participants were able to show RIF despite the overload of the attentional resources, sedentary participants were not. These results are discussed in terms of the modulatory role of chronic aerobic exercise on executive control and retrieval induced forgetting.
Highlights
Long-term and regular aerobic exercise –chronic aerobic exercise– has been established as a factor leading to improvements in executive control (Colcombe and Kramer, 2003; Biddle and Asare, 2011; Bherer et al, 2013; Guiney and Machado, 2013; Cox et al, 2015)
In order to explore whether the actual effect of chronic aerobic exercise in inhibitory control is related to attentional resources, it was decided to apply the “Dual-Retrieval Practice Task” (D-RP; Román et al, 2009) under the context of the Retrieval Practice paradigm (RP, Anderson et al, 1994)
The results showed that there was a Retrieval Induced Forgetting (RIF) effect in the young group when the updating task consisted of three digits, but not when consisting of five digits, confirming the idea that memory inhibition is dependent on executive control
Summary
Long-term and regular aerobic exercise –chronic aerobic exercise– has been established as a factor leading to improvements in executive control (Colcombe and Kramer, 2003; Biddle and Asare, 2011; Bherer et al, 2013; Guiney and Machado, 2013; Cox et al, 2015). Padilla et al (2017) investigated to what extent episodic memory would benefit from chronic aerobic exercise through the improvement of executive functions. They applied a selective attention task where participants were told to remember only those items that were selectively attended. Padilla et al (2014) showed that active participants had a greater working memory span than sedentary participants in a dual working memory task (Unsworth et al, 2005) Taken together, these results may indicate that chronic aerobic exercise has a specific effect on the way active participants deal with highly demanding dual tasks, which requires either suppressing non-relevant information/responses or storing information while they are performing a second task. The D-RP task explores the role of attentional resources on exerting suppression of interference –inhibition– in memory, since it combines a working memory task with episodic memory retrieval of competing information
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