Effects of aerobic exercise and gender on visual and auditory P300, reaction time, and accuracy

Abstract

Visual and auditory reaction times (RTs) have been reported to decrease during moderate aerobic exercise, and this has been interpreted as reflecting an exercise-induced activation (EIA) of cognitive information processing. In the present study we examined changes in several independent measures of information processing (RT, accuracy, P300 latency and amplitude) during exercise, and their relationship to visual or auditory modalities and to gender. P300 latencies offer independent measures of cognitive speed that are unrelated to motor output, and P300 amplitudes have been used as measures of attentional allocation. Twenty-four healthy college students [mean (SD) age 20 (2) years] performed auditory and visual "oddball" tasks during resting baseline, aerobic exercise, and recovery periods. Consistent with previous studies, both visual and auditory RTs during exercise were significantly shortened compared to control and recovery periods (which did not differ from each other). We now report that, paralleling the RT changes, auditory and visual P300 latencies decreased during exercise, indicating the occurrence of faster cognitive information processing in both sensory modalities. However, both auditory and visual P300 amplitudes decreased during exercise, suggesting diminished attentional resource allocation. In addition, error rates increased during exercise. Taken together, these results suggest that the enhancement of cognitive information processing speed during moderate aerobic exercise, although operating across genders and sensory modalities, is not a global facilitation of cognition, but is accompanied by decreased attention and increased errors.

Event-related potentials in clinical research: Guidelines for eliciting, recording, and quantifying mismatch negativity, P300, and N400

“…These biological determinants of P300 may occur spontaneously, be induced by environmental variables, or may stem from individual differences (Polich and Kok, 1995). Some of the determinants affecting P300 amplitude and latency include circadian and other seasonal cycles (Deldin et al, 1994), exercise and fatigue (Yagi et al, 1999), commonly used drugs, age, IQ, handedness, and gender, as well as some personality variables (Polich and Kok, 1995). Moreover, differences related to attentional capacity need to be considered (Kujala and Näätänen, 2003;Näätänen, 1995;Orlebeke et al, 1989;Pelosi et al, 1992a,b;Colet et al, 1993;Stelmack and Houlihan, 1994).…”

Tonic and transient oscillatory brain activity during acute exercise

“…exercise by means of EEG event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a way to pinpoint the brain correlates of (task relevant) stimulus processing under physical effort [13] [14][15] [16][17] [18]. Here, we take a step further by analysing power spectral changes time-locked to the (task) stimulus instead of ERPs.…”

“…The event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) analysis refers to transient decreases or increases in oscillatory brain activity locked to an event, which are thought to reflect the state of synchrony in a population of neurons [19][20] [21], and it may provide complementary information to that of the ERPs. The study of ERSP during exercise was achieved by including an oddball task whereby participants had to detect infrequent targets presented among a sequence of frequent distractors (see Yagi et al [18], for a similar approach although using ERPs).…”

“…The topography depicts t-test distribution across surface localization, showing the spatial characteristics of the higher power suppression of alpha in parieto-occipital electrodes during moderate-to-high exercise. (B) Parametric paired t-test maps comparison between moderate-to-high exercise and light exercise in lower beta frequency band [14][15][16][17][18][19][20] to standard trials. Right panel shows lower beta power across time at the parieto-occipital cluster (8 electrodes) in standard trials.…”

Facilitating effects of exercise on information processing

“…As noted by Yagi et al (1999), the use of reaction time as the sole measure of cognition limits the interpretation of the results. To gain a better understanding of the facilitating effect of physical exercise, we compared the results obtained with different variables.…”