Recent studies have reported enhanced visual responses during acute bouts of physical exercise, suggesting that sensory systems may become more sensitive during active exploration of the environment. This raises the possibility that exercise may also modulate brain activity associated with other cognitive functions, like visual working memory, that rely on patterns of activity that persist beyond the initial sensory evoked response. Here, we investigated whether the neural coding of an object location held in memory is modulated by an acute bout of aerobic exercise. Participants performed a spatial change detection task while seated on a stationary bike at rest and during low-intensity cycling (∼50 watts/50 RPM). Brain activity was measured with EEG. An inverted encoding modeling technique was employed to estimate location-selective channel response functions from topographical patterns of alpha-band (8–12 Hz) activity. There was strong evidence of robust spatially selective responses during stimulus presentation and retention periods both at rest and during exercise. During retention, the spatial selectivity of these responses decreased in the exercise condition relative to rest. A temporal generalization analysis indicated that models trained on one time period could be used to reconstruct the remembered locations at other time periods, however, generalization was degraded during exercise. Together, these results demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct the contents of working memory at rest and during exercise, but that exercise can result in degraded responses, which contrasts with the enhancements observed in early sensory processing.

An organism's current behavioral state influences ongoing brain activity. Nonhuman mammalian and invertebrate brains exhibit large increases in the gain of feature-selective neural responses in sensory cortex during locomotion, suggesting that the visual system becomes more sensitive when actively exploring the environment. This raises the possibility that human vision is also more sensitive during active movement. To investigate this possibility, we used an inverted encoding model technique to estimate feature-selective neural response profiles from EEG data acquired from participants performing an orientation discrimination task. Participants ( n = 18) fixated at the center of a flickering (15 Hz) circular grating presented at one of nine different orientations and monitored for a brief shift in orientation that occurred on every trial. Participants completed the task while seated on a stationary exercise bike at rest and during low- and high-intensity cycling. We found evidence for inverted-U effects; such that the peak of the reconstructed feature-selective tuning profiles was highest during low-intensity exercise compared with those estimated during rest and high-intensity exercise. When modeled, these effects were driven by changes in the gain of the tuning curve and in the profile bandwidth during low-intensity exercise relative to rest. Thus, despite profound differences in visual pathways across species, these data show that sensitivity in human visual cortex is also enhanced during locomotive behavior. Our results reveal the nature of exercise-induced gain on feature-selective coding in human sensory cortex and provide valuable evidence linking the neural mechanisms of behavior state across species.