Physical exercise is often linked to better cognitive performance. But it remains unclear how different types of movement affect the brain in real time. This study builds on previous research by examining memory and inhibitory control while directly measuring brain activity during exercise. Comparing cycling, swimming, and sitting.
Setup mobility and experimental paradigm
For all conditions, stimuli presentation and data recording are all done on a mobile phone. This provides more ecologically valid insights into brain activity during exercise!
Participants are a part of one of three groups: swimming, cycling, or sitting group. The authors wanted to investigate how exercise (or lack thereof) will affect their memory and inhibitory control. So, they included a memory task pre- and post-intervention.
The main memory task involved learning a list of words and later recalling them. Between the encoding (showing the list) and recalling (remembering the words), there was a distractor task. The goal of the distractor is to prevent rehearsing the words.
The distractor task was a simple Go/No-Go task. The participants were instructed to tap on the phone’s screen when seeing a square (Go) and do nothing when seeing a circle (No-Go).
The entire task block is repeated twice before, and again two times after the intervention.
Experimental paradigm. Before the intervention, the participants did the memory and distractor tasks two times. Then, we had the intervention: swimming, cycling in the lab or just sitting. After that, the memory/distractor tasks were repeated. But, not before the subjective measures! See below for more detail on that.Right after the exercise, participants filled out surveys. Surveys served as an indicator of the current mood and perceived strain during intervention.
Measuring brain activity during exercise
Authors used Smarting PRO – mbt’s mobile EEG device to record data. Its wireless design allowed reliable EEG data collection without restricting natural exercise behavior. For the swimming condition, it was especially challenging to set up all the measurements. So, if you’re curious about how they managed to set it all up, check out this blog on one of Melanie Klapprott’s earlier studies!
Authors focused on event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine neural markers. Specifically, analyzing the P300 associated with the subsequent memory effect. And looking into N200 linked to response inhibition during the Go/No-Go task.
Using heart rate (HR) measurements to assess physical activity
HR is used to verify that participants in the exercise conditions were engaging in light to moderate physical activity, compared to sitting. In the post-analysis, this was confirmed! See the HR data in the plot below:
HR changes for sit, bike and swim conditions throughout the experiment. We can see HR was significantly elevated for exercise groups compared to sitting, during intervention. It also stayed higher on average in post-intervention.Cycling showed significant improvement in task performance
Performance measures for memory and Go/No-Go tasks. The table includes all participant groups and pre- vs. post-intervention blocks.The study looked at how exercise affected memory and inhibitory control. Participants who cycled recalled more words than those who were sitting. They also performed more accurately on No-Go trials, showing that a single session of cycling can boost cognitive function.
The authors suggest cycling may enhance cognition through optimal physiological arousal. Based on previous studies, this can temporarily support memory and inhibition.
Swimming, however, didn’t significantly improve performance. This shows that not all exercise has the same effect on performance.
Cycling showed no changes in EEG markers, while swimming shows slight shift in N200 latency
P300 component during memory encoding in (A) pre- and (B) post-intervention. Differently colored lines are for sit, bike and swim groups. There’s also full and dotted lines for each group. The full lines represent ERPs for later recalled words, and dashed lines are the ERPs for forgotten words during the recall phase. We can also see topoplots for the same groups and conditions at the top. These show the activity over the scalp in the greyed-out time range.Both cycling and swimming showed no significant improvements in memory performance, based on P300. However, cycling did cause improvements in task performance. This highlights that brain activity during exercise doesn’t always show strong neural signatures, despite observable improvements in task performance.
N200 component during No-Go in (A) pre- and (B) post-intervention. Differently colored lines are for sit, bike and swim groups. We can also see topoplots for the same groups and conditions at the top. These show the activity over the scalp in the greyed-out time range.Swimming was associated with a slight shift in N200 latency. This would mean the brain responded a bit faster during inhibitory control trials, even though task performance didn’t improve.
This shows that swimming may influence neural processing speed, even if it doesn’t show performance benefits.
Cycling appears to provide cognitive benefits regarding word recall and accuracy as compared to the sedentary control group, but without measurable changes in ERPs. Swimming, in contrary, yielded neurophysiological modulations without behavioural improvement. Such discrepancies highlight the diverse nature of effects of physical education on cognition: neural adaptations may occur on different timescales than behavioral changes.
Future research can expand on this by examining other exercise, longer or repeated sessions, and more naturalistic settings for all conditions. This work helps clarify when changes in brain activity during exercise translate into meaningful cognitive benefits.
The original study is linked here.
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