Principal Investigator: mgr Tomasz Ligęza

Aerobic exercise includes any type of physical exercise performed at moderate levels of intensity for extended periods of time. Even a one session of such exercises improves mood. Although many psychological theories try to explain this effect, the mechanism of improved mood still remains unknown. Thus, our aim is to take to take the interdisciplinary approach that combines exercise psychology with advanced and pioneer neuroscience methods to understand this effect at very basic, neural level. Basing on the latest neuroscience research and our previous study, we would argue that mechanism of improved mood after physical exercise is related to changes in the way how brain processes emotional stimuli. To confirm this assumption we plan to verify how a single session of moderate-intensity activity impacts three main levels of emotional stimuli processing. This main objective will be accomplished by realizing four detailed aims considering the impact of the physical activity session on: 1.Perception of emotional visual stimuli (aim 1) 2.Performance of visual attention task with emotion-related material (aim 2) 3.Processes of evaluation of stimuli (aim 3) 4.Cortical effective connectivity related perceptual, attentional and evaluational brain centres (aim 4). We assume that changes in each of the emotional processing stage will contribute additively to improvedmood after exercise. Moreover, the effect will be mostly associated with increased influences from the control related brain centres (prefronal cortex) towards attentional and perceptual brain regions.