title: Physical fitness, but not acute exercise modulates event-related potential indices for executive control in healthy adolescents.
abstract: Physical activity and aerobic exercise in particular, promotes health and effective cognitive functioning. To elucidate mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of physical fitness and acute exercise, behavioral and electrophysiological indices of task preparation and response inhibition as a part of executive functions were assessed in a modified version of an Eriksen flanker task subsequent to an acute bout of aerobic exercise and a period of rest, respectively. 35 higher- and lower-fit adolescents between 13 and 14 years of age participated in a controlled cross-over study design. Results indicate that higher-fit individuals show significantly greater CNV amplitudes, reflecting enhanced task preparation processes, as well as decreased amplitudes in N2, indexing more efficient executive control processes. P3 amplitudes associated with the allocation of attentional and memory control neither showed influences of physical fitness nor the acute bout of exercise. Furthermore, acute aerobic exercise was not related to any of the dependent measures. The current findings suggest that physical fitness, but not an acute bout of aerobic exercise enhances cognitive processing by increasing attentional allocation to stimulus encoding during task preparation.
authors.affiliation: Transfercenter for Neuroscience and Learning, University of Ulm, Germany. sanna.stroth@uni-duesseldorf.de
authors.forename: Sanna
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Stroth
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kubesch
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Dieterle
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ruchsow
authors.forename: Rüdiger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Heim
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kiefer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001642:Bicycling / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology*; D018592:Cross-Over Studies; D018913:Event-Related Potentials, P300 / Q000502:physiology*; D015444:Exercise / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010809:Physical Fitness / Q000502:physiology*