The effects of different exercise modalities on visuospatial working memory in healthy young adults

Abstract

This study was to differentiate the acute effects of random motor skill practice and acute cardiovascular exercise on the task performance in visuospatial working memory (VSWM). 24 healthy adults with no golf experience were randomized into random motor skill practice (i.e., golf putting task) and acute cardiovascular exercise (i.e., 64% and 76 % of predicted maxi-mum heart rate) groups. Pre-test and post-test were administered for two VSWM tasks (i.e., memory matrix and rotation matrix). The performance of VSWM was improved immediately after the acute intervention. However, the improvement in retention effect was not maintained. In addition, no group differences were noted between random motor skill practice and acute cardiovascular exercise during post-test. The findings suggested the temporal effects of acute intervention. There is need to add a true control group for further research with larger sample size to examine the role of exercise modalities between acute intervention and executive function.