Moderate exercise does not immediately enhance short term memory retrieval

Exercise is viewed as an essential component to one’s lifestyle and an enhancement for bodily functions and longevity. We investigated the impact that exercise has on short-term memory recall ability. During exercise, heart rate and respiration increase allowing increased oxygen intake and flow, mainly directed towards the brain and muscles. We analyzed how exercise impacted short-term memory by having subjects recall slides before and after exercising. Subjects viewed ten slides, rested for ten minutes, and recalled what they saw. After the resting phase, subjects viewed ten different slides, exercised in order to maintain a target heart rate for five minutes, and recalled what they saw ten minutes after seeing the slides. In order to determine the impact that exercise has on memory, the number of slides recalled during the resting and exercising phases were compared. We monitored the heart rate to assess circulation efficiency, as well as respiration rate to see if there is an increase in oxygen intake, during both phases. Our results showed that moderate exercise has no significant immediate effect on short-term memory recall, due to no significance seen in the recall during resting versus exercising phases. Our investigation concludes that moderate exercise does not have a significant effect on short-term memory recall. We found that increased sympathetic stimulation does not elicit significant increased memory function during a non-threatening situation. The effect of the sympathetic system on short-term memory recall in different situations can be examined in further investigations. Introduction The value of exercise is greatly underestimated by many young people today. Not only can physical fitness decrease the likelihood of contracting diseases with age, but researchers have found that it could have a positive role in learning. Recent findings show that in pre-adolescents higher levels of fitness correlate to greater hippocampus volume and increased memory function (Chaddock et al., 2010). Similarly in another study, hippocampus function improved in young adult males with intense cycling exercises (Griffin et al., 2011). Particularly in the elderly increased aerobic exercise correlated with increased hippocampus volume and enhanced memory (Erickson et al., 2009). McMorris also demonstrated that acute exercise increases the processing speed of the working memory (McMorris et al., 2011). Memory can be encoded in three ways: visually, acoustically, and semantically. The main way for the hippocampus to store information in the short term memory is acoustic encoding, while the long