For instance, participants who engaged in light to moderate activity, such as going for regular walks, had better “episodic” memory. Think of episodic memory as “mental time travel,” Dr. Manning said, or the ability to remember details about everyday events, like meeting a friend in a coffee shop or watching for the school bus on your first day of kindergarten.
This tracks with a number of previous studies that have shown the more people are active, the better, on average, their episodic memory is.
Participants who regularly exercised more intensely — such as going for a run or doing a HIIT workout — were more likely to perform better on spatial memory tasks. Spatial memory is the ability to remember physical relationships between objects or locations in space, like where you put your keys. This mirrors a number of other studies that show high-intensity exercise improves memory, but goes further, suggesting it might be more helpful for this type of memory over another.
More study needs to be done to solidify these associations and determine what is causing them, the researchers said.
“The more that we can connect everyday patterns of activity to cognitive performance, the closer we are getting to thinking about lifestyle,” which includes how active you are during the entire day and sleep patterns, said Michelle Voss, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the study.
According to Phillip Tomporowski, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study, this paper is a “really good first guess” at how certain patterns of exercise affect certain types of memory.
dr Manning and his colleagues hope to follow up with controlled experiments to identify why certain exercises might affect specific types of memory.
Maybe someday there will be a workout to finally help you remember where you put your keys.
Rachel Fairbank is a freelance science writer based in Texas.