Abstract
The learning of new information is an important task in everyday life, especially at a young age. Acute physical exercise can facilitate cognitive processes in multiple ways, and previous studies have shown that memory can profit from physical exercise before and during the encoding of vocabulary. The current study investigates the interplay of movement and vocabulary learning and also addresses lifespan differences in these effects. Participants were recruited in a recreational basketball club. Children (n = 24, Mage = 12.3 years; 13 girls), young adults (n = 30, Mage = 21.5 years; 17 women), and older adults (n = 24, Mage = 59.3 years; 9 women) learned 20 new pseudo-words, which corresponded to a German word. In a between-subjects design, encoding took place either while standing, while running, or while running and dribbling a basketball. Recall was assessed three times throughout the learning session and on the following day. In children, more words could be remembered in the running condition compared to the standing condition. There were no differences between conditions for the young and older adults. Age-dependent reasons for this pattern of results are discussed and embedded into the literature of physical exercise. Our result suggests that implementing learning activities into children’s physical education or exercise activities could be beneficial.
Highlights
The learning of new information is an important task in everyday life
The analyses of variance (ANOVA) with position (4) as within-subjects factor and age group (3: children, young adults, and older adults) and condition (3: standing, running, and running and dribbling) as betweensubjects factors was conducted to investigate the effects of acute physical exercise on vocabulary learning
This interaction can be explained by paired-samples t-tests (Bonferroni corrected level of significance to p < 0.008) showing that children’s and older adult’s memory performance decreases from recall 3 to recall 4, but young adult’s performance does not
Summary
The learning of new information is an important task in everyday life. Physical exercise can improve cognitive performances, which has been demonstrated for long-term as well as acute exercise interventions. Chronic physical exercise has been shown to enhance cognitive processes in multiple ways [see a review by Tomporowski et al (2008) and a meta-analysis by Verburgh et al (2014)]. A single bout of acute physical exercise can facilitate various cognitive functions, from executive functions like inhibition, verbal fluency, decision making, and stroop interference (Chang et al, 2012) to memory processes involving the encoding and consolidation of new information (Roig et al, 2013). Several reviews and meta-analyses (Etnier et al, 1997; Tomporowski, 2003; Chang et al, 2012; Roig et al, 2016; Loprinzi et al, 2019) have concluded that the overall effects are small, and are moderated by the duration, the intensity, the type, and the timing of the exercise
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