Research suggests that regular aerobic exercise has the potential to improve executive functioning, even in healthy populations. The purpose of this review is to elucidate which components of executive functioning benefit from such exercise in healthy populations. In light of the developmental time course of executive functions, we consider separately children, young adults, and older adults. Data to date from studies of aging provide strong evidence of exercise-linked benefits related to task switching, selective attention, inhibition of prepotent responses, and working memory capacity; furthermore, cross-sectional fitness data suggest that working memory updating could potentially benefit as well. In young adults, working memory updating is the main executive function shown to benefit from regular exercise, but cross-sectional data further suggest that task-switching and posterror performance may also benefit. In children, working memory capacity has been shown to benefit, and cross-sectional data suggest potential benefits for selective attention and inhibitory control. Although more research investigating exercise-related benefits for specific components of executive functioning is clearly needed in young adults and children, when considered across the age groups, ample evidence indicates that regular engagement in aerobic exercise can provide a simple means for healthy people to optimize a range of executive functions.

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These results provide novel insight into the cognitive and cerebrovascular benefits that may be gained with regular engagement in physical activity, even in a high-functioning population. Moreover, they point to better CBF regulation as a specific mechanism that may drive physical activity-related cognitive benefits, which converges with recent data in older women (Brown et al., 2010).

We investigated working memory in patients with focal brain damage involving subregions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Lesions in the dorsal portion of lateral PFC or the ventromedial portion of orbital PFC did not impair performance in tasks that required maintenance and monitoring of object or spatial information. Larger lesions involving both ventral and dorsal parts of the lateral PFC impaired maintenance and monitoring of spatial and object information, with more severe deficits observed in the spatial tasks. The results support a distributed localization of function in lateral PFC during working memory.