IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2021;29:31-40. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2020.3030106. Epub 2021 Feb 25.
Accumulating efforts have been made to discover effective solutions for fatigue recovery with the ultimate aim of reducing adverse consequences of mental fatigue in real life. The previously-reported behavioral benefits of physical exercise on mental fatigue recovery prompted us to investigate the restorative effect and reveal the underlying neural mechanisms. Specifically, we introduced an empirical method to investigate the beneficial effect of physical exercise on the reorganization of EEG functional connectivity (FC) in a two-session experiment where one session including a successive 30-min psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) (No-intervention session) compared to an insertion of a mid-task 15-min cycling exercise (Intervention session). EEG FC was obtained from 21 participants and quantitatively assessed via graph theoretical analysis and a classification framework. The findings demonstrated the effectiveness of exercise intervention on behavioral performance as shown in improved reaction time and response accuracy. Although we found significantly altered network alterations towards the end of experiment in both sessions, no significant differences between the two sessions and no interaction between session and time were found in EEG network topology. Further interrogation of functional connectivity through classification analysis showed decreased FC in distributed brain areas, which may lead to the significant reduction of network efficiency in both sessions. Moreover, we showed distinct patterns of FC alterations between the two sessions, indicating different information processing strategies adopted in the intervention session. In sum, these results provide some of the first quantitative insights into the complex neural mechanism of exercise intervention for fatigue recovery and lead a new direction for further application research in real-world situations.
人们一直在努力寻找有效的方法来恢复疲劳，以减少精神疲劳在现实生活中的不利后果。先前有研究表明，体育锻炼对精神疲劳恢复有积极作用，促使我们进一步探究其恢复效果和潜在的神经机制。具体来说，我们采用一种实证方法来研究体育锻炼对 EEG 功能连接（FC）重组的有益效果，该方法在一个包含连续 30 分钟精神警觉任务（PVT）的两阶段实验中进行，其中一个阶段包括插入 15 分钟的周期性运动（干预阶段）。我们从 21 名参与者那里获得了 EEG FC，并通过图论分析和分类框架进行了定量评估。研究结果表明，运动干预对行为表现有效，表现为反应时间和响应准确性的提高。尽管我们在两个阶段的实验结束时都发现了网络变化显著，但两个阶段之间没有显著差异，阶段和时间之间也没有相互作用。通过分类分析进一步探究功能连接，发现分布式脑区的 FC 降低，这可能导致两个阶段的网络效率显著降低。此外，我们还发现两个阶段之间存在不同的 FC 变化模式，表明干预阶段采用了不同的信息处理策略。总之，这些结果为运动干预恢复疲劳的复杂神经机制提供了一些初步的定量见解，并为在现实情况下进一步应用研究开辟了新的方向。
