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Brain and motor performance : insights on exercise dependent motor learning, consolidation and inhibition across different tasks and life-span
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Resumo(s)
What are the limits of human motor performance? And how can we control our bodies when performing high complexity motor skills? What happens inside an athlete’s brain when the athlete surpasses his/her own limits? And, most of all, what transforms such a skill into an automated action that no longer needs attentional focus? Skills initially requiring a high level of concentration, like the acquisition of a novel motor task, become easier to perform, thanks to brain mechanisms that allow us to consolidate motor skills and focus our attention on something else. To address these questions we performed four studies with the following aims and main results: In the first study we analyzed a group of athletes and a group of non-athletes, to shed new light on how the consolidation of motor memories might differ between these two groups and across different tasks. Our findings suggest that differential formation and consolidation processes underlie different motor tasks. Although athletes did not outperform non-athletes on motor memory consolidation, they were more efficient in acquiring novel tasks, perhaps because the required motor schemes might have been anchored on previously acquired ones. The second study focused on the understanding of how the consolidation of a motor task could differ across the life span and how the capacity to react and inhibit a stimulus might change across age-groups. Our results showed us that the influence of both age and sex in task performance and consolidation is to be taken into consideration in order to ameliorate training and potentiate individual capacities while delaying age-related impairments. In the third study we aimed to measure the influence of acute physical exercise on the consolidation of a motor sequence. This investigation shed new light on physical exercise as a strategy to anticipate the enhancement gain with the consolidation of a motor sequence. However, it was clear that this enhancement was only possible when physical exercise was performed at 85% intensity and not with lower intensities. In the fourth study we aimed to investigate the influence of acute physical exercise and cardiovascular fitness on a go/no-go task, to investigate the impact of acute exercise on reaction time and decision-making, very important for planning exercise schedules. We found that acute exercise had no effect on different fitness level groups, however, the higher cardiovascular fitness group had better results on both conditions, in rest and after the acute exercise. Acute Physical exercise, per se, cannot change our capacity to react to a go/no-go task, however, when performed for enough time to enhance our VO2max, better results will be noted. With these studies, we have brought to light a new understanding of the limitations and possibilities of the process of motor learning (our performance enhancement during the practice of the task) and consolidation (the performance enhancement or stabilization after practice - during the off-line period where we do not train). The consolidation of motor memories is what allows for the amazing beauty of our seemingly effortless movements and gives us the ability to solve motor issues online, as they appear. Although these mechanisms are common to all of us, a motor expert brain is more efficient when controlling and correcting for errors.
Descrição
Tese de doutoramento, Ciências Biomédicas (Neurociências), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Medicina, 2017
Palavras-chave
Cérebro Exercício Destreza motora Aprendizagem Neurociências Teses de doutoramento - 2017