Date of Completion

2019

Document Type

Honors College Thesis

Department

Neuroscience

Thesis Type

Honors College

First Advisor

William Falls

Second Advisor

Nathan Jebbett

Third Advisor

Bryan Ballif

Keywords

Context-dependent, exercise, memory, object recognition

Abstract

Memory has been shown to be strongly associated with the context in which it is encoded, suggesting that the context is central to the memory itself. However, the effect of exercise on context dependent object recognition is not fully known. We then set out to investigate the effect of exercise on context dependent object recognition. In Experiment 1 we showed that a context change reduced object recognition memory but did not significantly disrupt object recognition. In Experiment 2 we assessed whether exercise would the mitigate the effect of context change. We showed that exercise does not significantly improve object recognition nor did it mitigate the effect of context change on object recognition. These results suggest that a discrete context change can significantly disrupt retrieval of object recognition memory. Our results do not agree with the body of literature related to this topic, so further inquisition into these effects should be undertaken to confirm or refute the impact of exercise on contextual object recognition.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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