United States: The latest report, based on decades of research analyzing the impact of physical exercise on cognitive functions, and as per evidence, it’s clear that one session of exercise is beneficial to mental performance.
More about the finding
A very recent research study carried out at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and reported in Communications Psychology, identified that short bursts of exercise have incremental effects on cognition, especially noticed in tasks that are reaction-based and need flexibility in the approach.
However, these effects depend on the type, intensity, and time of exercise, as well as the cognitive task to be solved.
Although it is widely acknowledged that exercise improves objective physical and sustainable cognition, the impact of single exercise bouts has been less discussed.
To resolve controversies found in prior research where single bouts were either beneficial, detrimental, or neutral to cognition, the researchers investigated the effects of single workouts on cognition.
They wanted to establish dependable trends in the affective connection between acute exercise and mental functioning, which includes attention, memory, and executive control functions, psypost.org reported.
What has the expert stated?
According to the study author Barry Giesbrecht, a professor and head of the Attention Lab at UC Santa Barbara, “Human cognitive neuroscience is a field dedicated to understanding the neural mechanism of cognitive function and how they relate to behavior. The field is based on laboratory experiments in which participants engage in tasks that we can tightly control and measure performance. Sometimes we also do measurements of brain activity using a variety of neuroimaging methods,” psypost.org reported.
“In my lab, we are very interested in how exercise and other changes in physiological state influence these processes. One of the most consistent findings in the literature is that exercise interventions (e.g., something like a program that you would engage in ~3 times a week over months) improve cognition and can even promote neurogenesis. Studies looking at the effects of single, acute bouts of exercise are much more mixed, largely due to variability in the cognitive tasks and exercise protocol. Here, what we tried to do is get a sense of what the most consistent patterns were in the literature,” Giesbrecht added.
How was the research conducted?
To determine the effect of acute exercise on cognitive outcomes, the researchers performed a meta-analysis of studies that were published between 1995 and 2023.
These were further grouped into experimental ones featuring people 18-45 years of age with a case representation of healthy adults.
Studies for inclusion had to show cognitive outcomes either as pre- and post-intervention or exercise and control, psypost.org reported.
Cognitive areas examined included but were not limited to, executive/working memory, attention, and motor output. In our meta-analysis, exercise was defined in a broad way in order to include various exercises of varying intensity.
Cognitive subtests assessed participants’ abilities in areas including learning and memory, attention, executive function, motor and cognition conduct, and reasoning.
What more has the expert stated?
The overall meta-analysis of the effect of exercise showed that a single bout of exercise had only a small but positive effect on overall cognitive performance.
The greatest and most enduring changes were observed for tasks implicating the executive functions of inhibition and shift setting, that is, switching of mental sets.
Maintaining the level of activity also turned out to be an important aspect in decision-making when considering the intensity of exercise.