Michigan State University researchers tested 75 college
students during a two-day period and found those who were less fit had a harder
time retaining information.
"The findings show that lower-fit individuals lose more
memory across time" said Kimberly Fenn, study co-author and assistant
professor of psychology.
The study, which appears online in the research journal
Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, is one of the first to
investigate young, supposedly healthy adults. Previous research on fitness and
memory has focused largely on children, whose brains are still developing, and
the elderly, whose memories are declining.
Participants studied related word pairs such as “camp” and “trail.”
The next day, they were tested on the word pairs to evaluate long-term memory
retention. Long-term memory is anything remembered more than about 30 seconds
ago.
Aerobic fitness was gauged by oxygen consumption derived
from a treadmill test and factored with the participants’ weight,
percent body fat, age and sex.
The findings speak to the increasingly sedentary lifestyles
found in the United States and other Western cultures. A surprising number of
the college students in the study were significantly out of shape and did much
worse at retaining information than those who were extremely fit, Fenn said
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