Effects of acute aerobic exercise on mnemonic discrimination performance in older adults

Ample evidence suggests exercise is beneficial for hippocampal function. Furthermore, a single session of aerobic exercise provides immediate benefits to mnemonic discrimination performance, a highly hippocampal-specific memory process, in healthy younger adults. However, it is unknown if a single s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 2023-07, Vol.29 (6), p.519-528
Main Authors: Callow, Daniel D., Pena, Gabriel S., Stark, Craig E. L., Smith, J. Carson
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aerobics
Aged
Aging
Exercise
Fitness training programs
Hippocampus
Humans
Hypotheses
Intervention
Memory
Middle age
Neurogenesis
Older people
Pattern recognition
Physical fitness
Verbal learning
Visual Perception
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Summary:Ample evidence suggests exercise is beneficial for hippocampal function. Furthermore, a single session of aerobic exercise provides immediate benefits to mnemonic discrimination performance, a highly hippocampal-specific memory process, in healthy younger adults. However, it is unknown if a single session of aerobic exercise alters mnemonic discrimination in older adults, who generally exhibit greater hippocampal deterioration and deficits in mnemonic discrimination performance. We conducted a within subject acute exercise study in 30 cognitively healthy and physically active older adults who underwent baseline testing and then completed two experimental visits in which they performed a mnemonic discrimination task before and after either 30 min of cycling exercise or 30 min of seated rest. Linear mixed-effects analyses were conducted in which condition order and age were controlled, time (pre vs. post) and condition (exercise vs. rest) were modeled as fixed effects, and subject as a random effect. No significant time by condition interaction effect was found for object recognition (  = .254, η =.01), while a significant reduction in interference was found for mnemonic discrimination performance following the exercise condition (  = .012, η =.07). A post-intervention only analysis indicated that there was no difference between condition for object recognition (  = .186, η =.06), but that participants had better mnemonic discrimination performance (  
ISSN:1355-6177
1469-7661
DOI:10.1017/S1355617722000492