The influence of exercise-induced arousal on processes of memory and metamemory

The benefits of exercise for both physical and psychological wellbeing are well established. The present study aimed to further investigate whether exercise is beneficial for memory and metamemory. Forty-one adults were randomly assigned to either exercise prior to encoding (n = 21) or not exercise (n = 20). Participants studied 100 word pairs and predicted the likelihood of recalling and recognising the target word in a memory test. There were no differences in mean number of words recalled between the exercise and control condition. Exercise had an effect on discrimination and confidence for JOLs, where the exercise condition was worse at discriminating between remembered and forgotten items (p = .003, d = 1.08) and had inflated confidence (p = .019, d = 0.78). There was also an effect of exercise on discrimination for FOKs, where those who exercised were worse at discriminating between items they remembered versus forgot (p = .077, d = 0.69). Although this difference did not reach statistical significance, it was a moderate to large effect. There was no effect of exercise on confidence. The data suggests that exercise prior to studying may be detrimental to both memory performance and the ability to accurately judge one's memory.