Back

Acute and chronic physical activity improve spatial pattern separation in humans

Ramirez Butavand, D.; Rodriguez, M. F.; Cifuentes, M. V.; Miranda, M.; Garcia Bauza, C.; Bekinschtein, P.; Ballarini, F.

2021-12-14 animal behavior and cognition
10.1101/2021.12.13.472386 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Physical activity benefits both fitness and cognition. However, its effect on long-term memory is unclear. Successful memory involves not only remembering information over time but also keeping memories distinct and less confusing. The ability to separate similar experiences into distinct memories is one of the main features of episodic memory. In this work, we evaluated the effect of acute and chronic physical activity on a new task to assess spatial pattern separation in a 3D virtual reality environment. We manipulated the load of memory similarity and found that 25 minutes of cycling after encoding - but not before retrieval - was sufficient to improve similar, but not dissimilar memories, 24 hours after encoding. Furthermore, we found that participants who engaged in regular physical activity, but not sedentary subjects, showed memory for the similar condition the next day. Thus, physical activity could be a simple way to improve discrimination of spatial memories in humans.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.