ABSTRACT
Chronic exercise intervention is a non-pharmacological therapy suggested to improve cognitive function in various populations. However, few meta-analyses have assessed the cognitive benefits associated with all FITT-VP variables (exercise frequency, intensity, bout duration time, type, volume or total intervention length, and progression) in healthy populations by age. Thus, this meta-analysis assessed the effects of each FITT-VP variable on cognitive function in healthy children, adults, and older adults. This study followed PRISMA guidelines. After searching PubMed and the Web of Science, we included 54 randomized controlled trials to examined the effects of FITT-VP variables on five cognitive domains: global cognition, executive function, memory, attention, and information processing. Moderation analyses assessed the effects by age and by each exercise variables. Exercise benefitted overall cognition and all subcognitive domains. Aerobic and resistance exercise showed the greatest benefits on global cognition and executive function respectively, whereas mind-body exercise benefitted memory. Among all populations, older adults showed the greatest benefits of exercise on global cognition, executive function, and memory compared with controls. Additional studies are needed to assess the effects of exercise on attention and information processing. This meta-analysis offers new insights on the relationships between cognition and FITT-VP exercise variables in healthy populations.
Subject(s)
Cognition , Cognitive Dysfunction , Humans , Aged , Executive Function , Exercise , Exercise Therapy , Health StatusABSTRACT
Attention to unpleasant odors is crucial for human safety because they may signal danger; however, whether odor concentration also plays a role remains debated. Here, we explored the effects of two concentrations of pleasant and unpleasant odors on the attention network, comprising the alerting, orienting, and executive control networks. Behavioral responses were examined using the Attention Network Test, while electrophysiological responses were examined by assessing N1 and N2 amplitudes in 30 young men. We found that irrespective of odor concentration, an unpleasant odor induced larger cue-related N1 and N2 amplitudes in the alerting and executive control networks at occipital and frontal electrode sites and that was only paralleled by a reduced behavioral response time of cue-related trails in the alerting network. Thus, our results do not provide supporting evidence for a concentration-dependent effect, but they do suggest that more attentional resources are allocated to alerting-relevant stimuli to improve behavioral response times to a potential threat in young men.
ABSTRACT
In real-life situations, emotional information is often expressed through multiple sensory channels, with cross-talk between channels. Previous research has established that odor environments regulate the recognition of facial expressions. Therefore, this study combined event-related potentials (ERPs) with a facial emotion recognition task to investigate the effect of food odor context on the recognition of facial expressions and its time course. Fifty-four participants were asked to identify happy, fearful, and neutral faces in an odor context (pleasant, unpleasant or neutral). Electroencephalography (EEG) was performed to extract event-related potentials (ERPs). Behaviorally, unpleasant food odors triggered faster recognition of facial expressions, especially fearful ones. ERP results found that in the early stage, unpleasant food odors within 80-110 ms evoked a larger P100 amplitude than pleasant food odors and no odors, which showed that the unpleasant odor environment promoted the rapid processing of facial expressions. Next, the interaction between odor environment and facial expressions occurred during the middle stage, and the fearful expression evoked a smaller VPP (vertex positive potential) amplitude than the happy and neutral expressions when exposed to the unpleasant food odor environment. This result indicates that unpleasant odor environment consumed fewer cognitive resources when judging fearful expression, showing the promoting effect of mood coherence effect. These findings provided evidence for how people chose odor environments to facilitate the recognition of facial expressions, and highlighted the advantages of unpleasant food odors in communicating emotional information across the olfactory and visual pathways.
