The Effects Of Aerobic Exercise On The Encoding Of Explicit And Implicit Memory

Memory plays an important role in human's daily life.Encoding is the initial stage of memory processing,which is of great significance to the study of memory.Based on whether previous experience consciously influence on memory performance,memory can be divided into explicit memory and implicit memory.A lot of research have been conducted to explore the influence factors of explicit memory and implicit memory,among them some studies have shown that physical exercise,especially aerobic exercise have a beneficial impact on people's explicit memory,however,only a few studies discussed the effect of aerobic exercise on implicit memory,and the conclusion is inconsistent.In addition,the measurement of explicit memory and implicit memory is inaccurate.In order to explore whether aerobic exercise is beneficial to explicit memory and implicit memory more accurately,a 2(subject type sedentary,exercise)×3(memory type:remembering items,priming items,and forgotting items)mixed experimental design was conducted and ERP(event-related potentials)was combined to explore the neural mechanism of chronic aerobic exercise on explicit memory and implicit memory.The two-stage forced recognition paradigm was used to separate implicit memory from explicit memory by dividing memory items into remembering items,initiating items and forgetting itemsThe results showed that exercise subjects perform better in the accuracy of explicit memory.The DM effect of the explicit memory first appeared in the frontal region of 200-300ms caused by the exercise subjects,and the average of ERP amplitude which is caused by the memorizing items was significantly larger than the average ERP amplitude of the sedentary subjects.In the frontal region of 300-400ms,the average ERP amplitude of sedentary subjects caused by remembering items was significantly larger than that of exercise subjects.In the parietal region of 600-700ms,the average of ERP amplitude caused by the memorizing items of the exercise subjects was significantly larger than that of the sedentary subjects.However,in terms of the implicit memory,there was no significant difference found between the exercise subjects and the sedentary subjects,neither in behavioral performance nor in ERP data.Therefore,we can conclude that aerobic exercise can effectively accelerate the processing speed of the frontal region,as well as improve the information integration ability of the parietal region.In this way can aerobic exercise improve the performance of explicit memory.However,aerobic exercise may not affect the performance of the implicit memory.This study can enrich the present theoretical results of the effect that aerobic exercise bring on memory and can encourage people to exercise more in order to have a healthier life.