Exercise Mode And Visuospatial Working Memory In Older Adults

The decline of visuospatial working memory in the elderly is one of the causes of cognitive aging,but it is also one of the characteristics of cognitive aging.It can be prevented and delayed by physical exercises.Lack of evidence have proved that whether physical exercises are effective in decaying the decline of visuospatial working memory.Also,lack of researches have divided physical exercises into open-skilled exercises and closed-skilled exercises in the studies of cognitive aging.A total of 111 healthy older adults were enrolled in the study.They were classified by the exercise-related questionnaire to be in an open-skill group,closed-skill group or sedentary group.The present study included 3 parts.The first part was to investigated visuospatial working memory in different exercise group in general(experiment 1).The second part examined whether the exercise-induced benefit of working memory was manifested in passive maintenance or active manipulation of working memory which was assessed by visuospatial short-term memory task(experiment 2)and visuospatial mental rotation task(experiment 3),respectively.The third part was based on the results of part 2,we further investigated the reason why open-skilled exercisers performed better on visuospatial short-term memory task.We changed the retention time of the retention interval in experiment 4,gave environment support in experiment 5 to prove the decay hypothesis.Also,we added the visuospatial(experiment 6)and verbal(experiment 7)interference in the visuospatial short-term memory task to test the interference hypothesis.The main result of the present studies are as follows.(1)Both closed-skill and openskill groups reached a higher accuracy than the sedentary group visuospatial working memory task.(2)open-skill group was more accurate than the sedentary group in the visuospatial short-term memory task,whereas the group difference in the visuospatial mental rotation task was not significant.(3)No main effect of group or interactions of different retention time on accuracy of different groups.(4)No group differences on accuracy were observed on environmental support condition.(5)Open-skilled exercises reached higher accuracy than the other two groups on visuospatial interference condition.(6)Open-skilled exercises reached higher accuracy than the other two groups on verbal interference condition.The main conclusion of the present study:(1)Older adults with physical exercises(on matter which kind of exercise)have better visuospatial working memory ability than their sedentary controls.(2)The difference on visuospatial working memory may due to the differences of passive storage because open-skilled exercisers performed better on visuospatial short-term memory.(3)The difference on passive storage may explained by the interference hypothesis not decay hypothesis.