Rocking the cerebral blood flow: the influence of music listening and aerobic exercise on cortical hemodynamics and post-intervention executive function.

A single bout of exercise transiently "boosts" executive function (EF) and is a benefit that may be linked to an increase in cerebral blood flow (CBF). In turn, some work has reported that music listening imparts a similar EF benefit and increases CBF. In the present work, we examined whether music listening provides an EF benefit comparable to aerobic exercise and whether combined music listening and aerobic exercise supports an additive benefit. To that end, healthy young adults (N = 22, 14 female, 19-28 years) completed 10-min single bouts of: (1) music listening (ML), (2) light intensity aerobic exercise (AE), (3) combined ML and AE (ML + AE), and (4) a non-AE and non-ML control condition. For all conditions, pre- and post-intervention EF was assessed via the antisaccade task (i.e., saccade mirror-symmetrical to a target) and transcranial Doppler ultrasound measured middle cerebral artery velocity (MCAv) to estimate CBF. Results showed that ML, AE and ML + AE conditions increased MCAv; however, only the latter two conditions produced a pre- to post-intervention reduction in antisaccade RTs and the benefit was not linked to a MCAv change. Moreover, frequentist and Bayesian statistics indicated that the reduction in antisaccade RTs was equivalent across AE and ML + AE conditions. Accordingly, a single bout of exercise - and not a single bout of music listening - supports a non-additive post-intervention EF benefit that is not related to an exercise-based increase in CBF. Such findings suggest that exercise serves as a simple and cost-effective tool that can "boost" EF in advance of occupational- or educational-demanding tasks.