Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA.
Sci Rep. 2022 Aug 15;12(1):13822. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-17781-0.
Physical activity can benefit both physical and mental well-being. Different forms of exercise (e.g., aerobic versus anaerobic; running versus walking, swimming, or yoga; high-intensity interval training versus endurance workouts; etc.) impact physical fitness in different ways. For example, running may substantially impact leg and heart strength but only moderately impact arm strength. We hypothesized that the mental benefits of physical activity might be similarly differentiated. We focused specifically on how different intensities of physical activity might relate to different aspects of memory and mental health. To test our hypothesis, we collected (in aggregate) roughly a century's worth of fitness data. We then asked participants to fill out surveys asking them to self-report on different aspects of their mental health. We also asked participants to engage in a battery of memory tasks that tested their short and long term episodic, semantic, and spatial memory performance. We found that participants with similar physical activity habits and fitness profiles tended to also exhibit similar mental health and task performance profiles. These effects were task-specific in that different physical activity patterns or fitness characteristics varied with different aspects of memory, on different tasks. Taken together, these findings provide foundational work for designing physical activity interventions that target specific components of cognitive performance and mental health by leveraging low-cost fitness tracking devices.
体育活动有益于身心健康。不同形式的运动（例如，有氧运动与无氧运动；跑步与步行、游泳或瑜伽；高强度间歇训练与耐力训练等）以不同的方式影响身体健康。例如，跑步可能会显著影响腿部和心脏力量，但只会适度影响手臂力量。我们假设体育活动的心理益处可能也会有类似的差异。我们特别关注不同强度的体育活动如何与记忆和心理健康的不同方面相关。为了检验我们的假设，我们收集了（大致）一个世纪的健身数据。然后，我们要求参与者填写调查问卷，让他们自我报告心理健康的不同方面。我们还要求参与者进行一系列记忆任务，以测试他们的短期和长期情景、语义和空间记忆表现。我们发现，具有相似体育活动习惯和健身特征的参与者往往也表现出相似的心理健康和任务表现特征。这些影响是特定于任务的，因为不同的体育活动模式或健身特征在不同的记忆任务上存在差异。总的来说，这些发现为设计体育活动干预措施提供了基础工作，这些干预措施通过利用低成本的健身追踪设备，针对认知表现和心理健康的特定组成部分。
