title: The influence of exercise-induced fatigue on cognitive function.
abstract: Although anecdotal reports suggest that information processing and decision making is impaired immediately following prolonged periods of physical activity, results obtained from laboratory studies of exercise-induced fatigue have been inconsistent. Fatigue effects may be task specific and related to the time of post-exercise testing. The present study examined the effects on adults' performance of two cognitive tasks that differed in processing demands over an 80-min period of fatigue. Thirty young adult men and women were randomly assigned to either an exercise group and completed a 60-min bout of cycle ergometry at 90% ventilatory threshold or a control group and rested for 60 min. Following interventions, each participant completed a simple and complex version of a visual perceptual discrimination test, a 40-min memory-based vigilance test and a repetition of the visual perceptual discrimination tests. Those who exercised evidenced significant decrements in performance on complex perceptual-discrimination tasks compared to participants who rested. The response time of exercisers during a memory-demanding vigilance test were significantly slower than those of participants who rested; however, detection performance did not differ between groups neither was there a decrease in target detection across the vigil. The effects of exercise-induced fatigue may be task specific, with greater effects on perceptual tasks, which involve relatively automatic processing, compared to effortful memory-based tasks.
authors.affiliation: Kinesiology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
authors.forename: Robert D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Moore
authors.forename: Mathew W
authors.initials: MW
authors.lastname: Romine
authors.forename: Patrick J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: O'connor
authors.forename: Phillip D
authors.initials: PD
authors.lastname: Tomporowski
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001642:Bicycling / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000209:etiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D015444:Exercise / Q000502:physiology*; D005221:Fatigue / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult