The Immediate and Delayed Effects of Acute Physical Activity on the Cognitive Performance of Collegiate Students

Previous research has indicated that acute physical activity has an immediate positive impact on cognitive functions such as memory, attention, spatial reasoning, and verbal fluency. Despite this growing body of evidence supporting the short-term, immediate effects of acute exercise, there is little investigation into the whether the magnitude of these effects declines as a function of time. In addition, studies tend to narrowly utilize singular cognitive activities as their dependent measures. Oftentimes, these measures are associated with significant psychometric issues which leads to unreliable results whereas multiple-measures approaches have been shown to improve both reliability and validity while decreasing subjectivity. The current study seeks to remedy these two issues. In each of two data collection sessions, healthy college student participants were asked to complete a moderate exercise protocol. Immediately after one of the sessions, participants were asked to complete a series of cognitive tasks to investigate cognitive performance. In a separate session, each participant was required to complete the exercise protocol and to return at least two hours later to complete a parallel version of the cognitive tasks. Results were interpreted in light of their academic and clinical applications