Short Bouts, Big Impact: The Cognitive Benefits of Brief Exercise

Acute bouts of exercise have been shown to have measurable positive impacts on cognition. Here participants either watched a movie (control), walked (moderate exercise), or ran (vigorous exercise) on a treadmill for 30 min while their heart rate was measured before completing a paired associative learning task in which they learned 40 word pairs over the course of 10 trials. We defined learning rate as how fast the participants correctly learned the word pairs. Two days later, all participants were given a surprise recall task, and we defined long-term memory as the number of word pairs correctly recalled. We also measured working memory capacity, anxiety, and sleep quality. We found that while there was no difference between exercise conditions in the rate of learning, participants in the vigorous condition recalled more word pairs 2 days later. Analyses revealed that average heart rate and condition were the only significant predictors of long-term recall. Potential mechanisms to explain the benefits of the vigorous exercise condition on long-term retention, but not on short-term retention, are discussed.