Effects of Stress Related Acute Exercise on Reconsolidation of Implicit Motor Memory in Women

Stress is a powerful modulator of memory performance. Emotional arousal affects the various aspects of learning and memory through stimulation of the amygdala or the hippocampus. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of stress related acute exercise on reconsolidation of dart throwing task learned with errorless method. Participants of the study included 60 girls with an average age of 20.5 who were randomly assigned to three groups including: target (n = 20), control (n=20), and control 2 (n = 20). On the first day, all three groups under the same conditions acquired the skill of throwing darts in an errorless method and immediately after that performed the immediate retrieval. On the second day, after memory reactivation, the target group was exposed to stress resulting of acute exercise while the control 1 group did rest. The acute stress was presented to control 2 group without memory reactivation. During the experiment, changes in salivary cortisol were measured. On the third day, the delayed memory retrieval for each of the three groups was implemented.
Findings: the results showed that while the control 1 and control 2 groups did not show enhancement of dart throwing learning across delayed memory retrieval than immediate retrieval, the target group showed substantial enhancement across the same time (p<0.05). Our findings indicate that acute stress after memory reactivation can facilitate the implicit motor memory reconsolidation in women