Spin: The Effects of Acute Exercise on Speech Perception

Previous research suggests that adults who exercise regularly perform better on cognitive tasks. Most of these studies have focused on the benefits of aerobic exercise on executive function in the aging population. Very few studies to date have focused on how exercise affects perceptual abilities, particularly in healthy young adults. This is particularly important since poor cardiovascular health and low fitness levels are risk factors for hearing loss. The purpose of this study was to test whether exercising, defined as cycling for 30 minutes, affects auditory perception. College-aged participants performed a speech perception task before and after 30 minutes of aerobic exercise on a stationary bicycle. Auditory stimuli were speech that varied in intelligibility and have been used in previous experiments. Words were presented in noise and participants reported aloud the word they identified. The experimenter recorded participant responses during the experiment and the percentage of words correctly identified was calculated. Analysis revealed that there was a significant difference between the percentage of words correctly identified before exercise and after exercise. These results suggest that acute aerobic exercise has immediate effects that improve speech perception ability.