Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

A Single Bout of Low “Density” Exercise Optimizes a Post-exercise Executive Function Benefit

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Antonio Mendes¹ (amende@uwo.ca), Denait Haile¹, Jianchun Yin², Matthew Heath¹; ¹Western University, ²Shanghai Normal University

An extensive literature reports that a single bout of exercise provides a postexercise executive function (EF) benefit. Research has focused on the exercise type (e.g., aerobic vs. resistance) and/or duration optimizing the benefit; however, limited work has examined whether the distribution of exercise compared to the time spent at rest (density) impacts the magnitude of an EF benefit. Density represents a salient issue because it provides a framework to understand the physiological “supply and demand” mechanisms supporting transient and long-term EF changes. Healthy young adults (N=7) completed conditions involving ten 1-min intervals of metronome-paced leg extensions interspersed with 1-min (high-density: HD) and 2-min (low-density: LD) rest intervals. For all conditions, transcranial Doppler ultrasound measured middle cerebral artery velocity (MCAv) to estimate cerebral blood flow (CBF) and EF was assessed before and immediately after each protocol via the antisaccade task (saccade mirror-symmetrical to an exogenous target). Results showed that HD and LD conditions produced a baseline to steady state increase in MCAv (ps<.001) with a larger magnitude increase in the former condition. The LD (p<.04) – but not HD (p>.25) – condition produced a pre- to postexercise reduction in antisaccade reaction time (RT) (p<.04), and the magnitude of MCAv and RT changes in both exercise conditions were not correlated (ps>.45). These preliminary findings demonstrate that “density” is a potential moderator of a postexercise EF benefit and indicate that a change in CBF does not represent a primary mechanism supporting the benefit.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Monitoring & inhibitory control