Acute Aerobic Exercise Enhances Associative Learning in Active but not Sedentary Individuals

Physical exercise has repeatedly been reported to have advantageous effects on brain functions, including learning and memory formation. However, objective tools to measure such effects are often lacking. Eyeblink conditioning is a well-characterised method for studying the neural basis of associative learning. As such, this paradigm has potential as a tool to assess to what extent exercise affects one of the most basic forms of learning. Until recently, however, using this paradigm for testing human subjects in their daily life was technically challenging. As a consequence, no studies have investigated how exercise affects eyeblink conditioning in humans. Here we hypothesize that acute aerobic exercise is associated with improved performance in eyeblink conditioning. Furthermore, we explored whether the effects of exercise differed for people with an active versus a sedentary lifestyle. We conducted a case-control study using a smartphone-based platform for conducting neurometric eyeblink conditioning in healthy adults aged between 18-40 years (n = 36). Groups were matched on age, sex, and education level. Our primary outcome measures included the amplitude and timing of conditioned eyelid responses over the course of eyeblink training. As a secondary measure, we studied the amplitude of the unconditioned responses. Acute exercise significantly enhanced the acquisition of conditioned eyelid responses; however, this effect was only true for individuals with an active lifestyle. No statistically significant effects were established for timing of the conditioned responses and amplitude of the unconditioned responses. This study highlights a facilitative role of acute aerobic exercise in associative learning and emphasises the importance of accounting for lifestyle when investigating the acute effects of exercise on brain functioning.