부산대학교 도서관

Background:Mounting research has linked moderate-intensity exercise with chan ges in discrimination of similar events - i.e., mnemonic memory. Conver sely, few studies have compared performance in tasks associated to each type of memory (mnemonic similarity and emotional) or have evaluated perfor - mance several days after exercise sessions. Material/Methods:Thirty-five undergraduate students were randomly distributed in three groups that differed in the duration of the moderate-intensity exercise session. First, we established the moderate-intensity exercise program by calculating the VO2max 50%. Two-to-five days later, participants engaged in the exercise condition to which they were assigned, followed by a fiveminute resting period. Immediately after, all participants were exposed to the training phase of both memory tasks. The first retrieval phase was tested 45 minutes after the encoding phase was completed. Subsequent retrieval phases were conducted 24, 48, and 168 hours post-training. Results:Exercise of long duration increased discrimination performance in images of low similarity. A comparison of the effects of exercise on discrimination of the three types of images that the emotional-memory task entailed (appetitive, aversive, and neutral) showed improved performance only for aversive and neutral images. Conclusions:Exercise improves discrimination of low similarity images, with overall better performance after a longer exercise session. This finding adds to previous studies that reported analogous effects using other memory tasks. It also supports the notion that acute effects of exercise are specifically related to hippocampal functionality and its ability to separate patterns. Finally, maintenance of emotional information across time suggests a different mechanism, independent of pattern-separation processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]