The Association between Physical Activity During the Day and Long-Term Memory Stability

Abstract

Despite positive associations between chronic physical activity and memory; we have little understanding of how best to incorporate physical activity during the day to facilitate the consolidation of information into memory, nor even how time spent physically active during the day relates to memory processes. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the relation between physical activity during the day and long-term memory. Ninety-two young adults learned a list of paired-associate items and were tested on the items after a 12-hour interval during which heart rate was recorded continuously. Although the percentage of time spent active during the day was unrelated to memory, two critical physical activity periods were identified as relating to the maintenance of long-term memory. Engaging in physical activity during the period 1 to 2-hours following the encoding of information was observed to be detrimental to the maintenance of information in long-term memory. In contrast, physical activity during the period 1-hour prior to memory retrieval was associated with superior memory performance, likely due to enhanced retrieval processing. These findings provide initial evidence to suggest that long-term memory may be enhanced by more carefully attending to the relative timing of physical activity incorporated during the day.

Potential avenues for exercise to activate episodic memory‐related pathways: a narrative review

“…In addition to exercise improving memory retrieval when exercise occurs at the very beginning of the consolidation period, other work (among humans) also demonstrates a similar beneficial effect when exercise occurs later during the consolidation period (van Dongen et al ., ). Not all work (Pontifex et al ., ), however, has confirmed these findings, which underscores the importance of future work on this underinvestigated topic.…”

Randomized controlled trial evaluating the temporal effects of high‐intensity exercise on learning, short‐term and long‐term memory, and prospective memory

“…Although we did not observe a beneficial effect of exercise during the memory consolidation period, which is consistent with some (Pontifex et al ., ), but not all studies (van Dongen et al ., ; da Silva de Vargas et al ., ), such an effect is plausible given that exercise may help to facilitate norepinephrine release (Segal et al ., ), which appears to play an important role in memory consolidation (Mello‐Carpes & Izquierdo, ). Lastly, and although our results did not reach the statistical significance threshold, the group that exercised during memory encoding tended to have worse memory performance across RAVLT trials 1–6, 20‐min delay and 24‐h follow‐up.…”

Intensity-specific effects of acute exercise on human memory function: considerations for the timing of exercise and the type of memory

“…33 In addition to these laboratory findings evaluating exercise very shortly after memory encoding, other work in free-living settings shows that exercising 1-2 hours after memory encoding may also be less advantageous for long-term memory. 52 Notably, however, emerging work suggests that exercising 4-hours after memory encoding is associated with enhanced long-term memory function. 53 Future work is needed that examines different temporal periods of exercise post-encoding to evaluate whether there is an optimal time period to which exercise may enhance the consolidation of memories.…”