Acute effects of aerobic exercise on conflict suppression, response inhibition, and processing efficiency underlying inhibitory control processes: An ERP and SFT study

Abstract Aerobic exercise has been identified as an effective strategy for transiently enhancing inhibitory control, an ability to suppress irrelevant distractors while focusing on relevant information in facilitating the implementation of goal‐directed behavior. The purpose of this study was to employ a go/no‐go version of the redundant‐target task and event‐related potential to further determine whether inhibitory control at the perceptual and response levels as well as their underlying processing capacity and neuroelectric alterations are differentially affected by a single bout of aerobic exercise. Twenty‐seven young adults completed the redundant‐target task while electroencephalogram was recorded before and after one 20‐min bout of moderate‐intensity aerobic exercise and a sitting control condition on separate days in counterbalanced order. Although behavioral outcomes of mean‐level performance did not differ between intervention conditions, time‐related decreases in processing capacity for the faster responses were only observed following rest. Aerobic exercise resulted in maintained P3b amplitude from pretest to posttest for all trial types while decreased P3b amplitude from pretest to posttest during single‐target and redundant‐target trials was observed following rest. Further, the time‐related changes in P3b amplitude were positively correlated with improvements in task performance following exercise. These findings suggest that a short bout of aerobic exercise selectively counteracts the time‐related decrements in processing capacity as well as neuroelectric processing of attention and conflict suppression that contribute to behavioral outcomes of inhibitory control.