Regular Exercise Enhances Task-Based Industriousness in Laboratory Rats

Abstract

Individuals vary greatly in their willingness to select and persist in effortful tasks, even when high-effort will knowingly result in high-reward. Individuals who select and successively complete effortful, goal-directed tasks can be described as industrious. Trying to increase one’s industriousness is desirable from a productivity standpoint, yet intrinsically challenging given that effort expenditure is generally aversive. Here we show that in laboratory rats, a basic physical exercise regimen (20 min/day, five days/week) is sufficient to increase industriousness across a battery of subsequent testing tasks. Exercised rats outperformed their non-exercised counterparts in tasks designed to tax effort expenditure, strategic decision-making, problem solving and persistence. These increases in performance led to quicker reward obtainment and greater reward gain over time, and could not be accounted for simply by increased locomotor activity. Our results suggest that a basic exercise regimen can enhance effortful goal-directed behaviour in goal-directed tasks, which highlights a potential productivity benefit of staying physically active.

Previous motor activity affects transition from uncertainty to decision-making in snails

“…Facilitation of the decision to make physical effort and increase the speed of locomotion, as observed in our experiments, astonishingly parallels the effects of exercise on willingness to make both physical and cognitive effort in rodents and humans (Eisenberger, 1992;Laurence et al, 2015). These effects are puzzling in terms of cost, because motor load by itself is energetically costly, while both types of activity (mental and physical) are likely to be associated with significant additional costs (for a discussion on the costs of cognitive functions, see Kawecki, 2003, 2005;Krushinsky, 2015).…”

“…These effects are puzzling in terms of cost, because motor load by itself is energetically costly, while both types of activity (mental and physical) are likely to be associated with significant additional costs (for a discussion on the costs of cognitive functions, see Kawecki, 2003, 2005;Krushinsky, 2015). Proposed explanations of this paradoxical action were attributed to repeated training and presumed a rather complicated subjective estimation of values and intensity of effort in mammals (Eisenberger, 1992;Laurence et al, 2015).…”

“…In rodents and humans, physical activity has been reported to improve memory and learning (van Praag et al, 1999(van Praag et al, , 2005Anderson et al, 2000;Cotman et al, 2007;van Praag, 2009;Roig et al, 2012), and to enhance performance in various cognitive tasks such as goal-oriented and effortful behaviours (Chang et al, 2013;Lee et al, 2013;Salmon, 2001;Laurence et al, 2015). One of the most commonly accepted benefits of physical exercise is the reduction in the symptoms of depression, including the facilitation of decision making (Whitton et al, 2015;Salmon, 2001;Greenwood et al, 2003).…”

The Role of Serotonin in the Influence of Intense Locomotion on the Behavior Under Uncertainty in the Mollusk Lymnaea stagnalis

“…The known effects of exercise, such as facilitation of learning and memory for novel information (Epp et al, 2016), activation of neurogenesis (van Praag et al, 1999, Lee et al, 2013, enhancement of goal-oriented behavior and "effortfulness" (Laurence et al, 2015, Korshunova et al, 2016, decreasing the sensitivity to external disturbances and stress (Stevenson et al, 2005) and facilitation of effort-based decision-making (Bernacer et al, 2019) agree with this hypothesis. These behavioral and physiological changes may help the organism to cope with excess of novel information and stress.…”

“…The influence of physical exercise on brain function has been thoroughly investigated in various mammalian species (van Praag et al, 1999;Salmon, 2001;Cotman et al, 2007;Hillman et al, 2008;Roig et al, 2012;Laurence et al, 2015). It has been suggested that feedforward brain activation caused by intense locomotion is a widespread phenomenon throughout the animal kingdom that may be especially beneficial for subsequent orientation and adaptation in the novel environment (Stevenson et al, 2005;Dyakonova and Krushinsky, 2008;Korshunova et al, 2016).…”