Recent studies have reported enhanced visual responses during acute bouts of physical exercise, suggesting that sensory systems may become more sensitive during active exploration of the environment. This raises the possibility that exercise may also modulate brain activity associated with other cognitive functions, like visual working memory, that rely on patterns of activity that persist beyond the initial sensory evoked response. Here, we investigated whether the neural coding of an object location held in memory is modulated by an acute bout of aerobic exercise. Participants performed a spatial change detection task while seated on a stationary bike at rest and during low-intensity cycling (∼50 watts/50 RPM). Brain activity was measured with EEG. An inverted encoding modeling technique was employed to estimate location-selective channel response functions from topographical patterns of alpha-band (8-12 Hz) activity. There was strong evidence of robust spatially selective responses during stimulus presentation and retention periods both at rest and during exercise. During retention, the spatial selectivity of these responses decreased in the exercise condition relative to rest. A temporal generalization analysis indicated that models trained on one time period could be used to reconstruct the remembered locations at other time periods, however, generalization was degraded during exercise. Together, these results demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct the contents of working memory at rest and during exercise, but that exercise can result in degraded responses, which contrasts with the enhancements observed in early sensory processing.

中文翻译：

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在急性有氧运动期间跟踪空间工作记忆的内容。

最近的研究报告了在剧烈的体育锻炼期间视觉反应增强，这表明在积极探索环境期间感觉系统可能变得更加敏感。这增加了运动也可能调节与其他认知功能相关的大脑活动的可能性，如视觉工作记忆，这些活动依赖于超出初始感官诱发反应的活动模式。在这里，我们研究了记忆中物体位置的神经编码是否受到急性有氧运动的调节。参与者在休息和低强度骑行（~50 瓦/50 RPM）期间坐在固定自行车上执行空间变化检测任务。用脑电图测量大脑活动。采用反向编码建模技术从 alpha 波段 (8-12 Hz) 活动的地形模式中估计位置选择性通道响应函数。有强有力的证据表明，无论是在休息时还是在运动时，刺激呈现和保留期间都有强烈的空间选择性反应。在保持期间，这些反应的空间选择性在运动条件下相对于休息下降。时间泛化分析表明，在一个时间段训练的模型可用于重建其他时间段的记忆位置，但是，在运动过程中泛化能力下降。总之，这些结果表明，在休息和运动期间重建工作记忆的内容是可能的，但运动会导致反应下降，