Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of different types of acute exercise on cognitive function and cerebral oxygenation. A within-subject design was adopted. In total, 20 healthy older adults were enrolled in the study. They came to the laboratory individually on four separate days and completed four conditions of activity. Four conditions were sedentary reading control (RC), cognitive exercise (CE), physical exercise (PE) and cognitive + physical exercise (CE + PE). During these visits, participants completed the Stroop task before and immediately after the experimental condition, which consisted of 15 min of aerobic exercise, verbal fluency task (VFT), and dual task. The Stroop task included the following two conditions: a naming condition and an executive condition. The fNIRS is an optical method using near-infrared light to measure relative changes of oxygenated (O2Hb) and deoxygenated (HHb) hemoglobin in the cortex. The results indicate that acute exercise facilitates performance for executive tasks, not only combined cognition, but also the different results between combined exercise and single exercise. The fNIRS findings showed that acute single exercise influences oxygenation for executive tasks but not for naming tasks. Greater improvement was observed in the post-exercise session of combined exercise during the modified Stroop. These findings demonstrate that acute single exercise, single cognition exercise, and combined exercise enhanced the performance of the inhibition control task. Only acute combined exercise has a general facilitative effect on inhibition control. Combined exercise was shown to be superior to single exercise for task-efficient cerebral oxygenation and improved oxygen utilization during cortical activation in older individuals. Also, to maximize the performance of cognition it may be important for older adults to take part in more cognitive demand exercise or take more kinds of exercise.
Highlights
Some meta-analytic reviews and interventions have demonstrated that acute exercises including short duration exercises have positive effects on cognition in older adults (Chang et al, 2012; Peiffer et al, 2015)
The aim of this study is to address the gap in knowledge regarding the effects of acute combined and single exercise on cognitive function and cerebral oxygenation
The findings reveal that acute exercise facilitates performance for executive tasks, combined cognition, and the different results between combined exercise and single exercise
Summary
Some meta-analytic reviews and interventions have demonstrated that acute exercises including short duration exercises have positive effects on cognition in older adults (Chang et al, 2012; Peiffer et al, 2015). In recent studies that take advantage of human brain imaging, a change in brain oxygenation has been demonstrated in pre-and post-invention tests. Most of those studies showed an increase in oxygenation of PFC following exercise (Jung et al, 2015). Recent findings from fNIRS studies showed that an acute bout of exercise, regardless of intensity, improves performance on executive function and may induce different prefrontal area oxygenation. Endo et al (2013) demonstrated that exercise at moderate intensity for 15 min may improve cognitive function and neural activity in the prefrontal areas. Byun et al (2014) showed the acute bout of mild exercise can improve Stroop performance, which evoked cortical activations on the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and frontopolar area
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