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.

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Humans have a remarkable capability to respond efficiently to a stimulus of interest despite other stimuli competing for neural resources. The current study investigated how the human system copes with distracting stimuli. During each trial, participants viewed 2 sequential stimuli that were each associated with a specific action based on an arbitrary mapping. The 1st stimulus served as a distractor, and the 2nd stimulus required a response (target). When the distractor preceded the target by more than a few hundred milliseconds, response latencies were slower when the 2 stimuli were associated with the same response. The authors propose that this negative compatibility effect stemmed from an inhibitory mechanism that the human system utilizes to prevent the distractor from eliciting an unwanted response.

To help advance the field, this review puts forward recommendations for future research, with an emphasis on the need for robust study designs and specific investigations into the nature and extent of the cognitive benefits of volunteering. Through that work, researchers can determine how a simple and accessible activity like volunteering can best be used to help reduce the burden of age-related cognitive decline.

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