Just like keeping your body fit helps you tackle physical obstacles, staying mentally fit can impact your ability to navigate through life’s challenges. As we age, our navigation skills tend to decline, but there are ways to preserve them. One way is by improving cardiorespiratory fitness, which has been shown to have positive effects on the brain regions responsible for spatial navigation. In a recent study, researchers examined how cardiorespiratory fitness influenced brain activity during a virtual reality navigation task in older adults. The results showed that cardiorespiratory fitness was associated with increased activity in the right cerebellum lobule VIIa Crus I and II in older adult women. This finding suggests that staying physically active can not only benefit the hippocampus, a region commonly associated with memory, but also the cerebellum. The cerebellum is known for its role in coordinating movement, but recent research indicates its involvement in cognitive processes like spatial processing. These findings open up new possibilities for interventions that target cardiorespiratory fitness as a way to maintain cognitive function and navigate through life with ease!

Spatial navigation is a cognitive skill critical for accomplishing daily goal-directed behavior in a complex environment; however, older adults exhibit marked decline in navigation performance with age. Neuroprotective interventions that enhance the functional integrity of navigation-linked brain regions, such as those in the medial temporal lobe memory system, may preserve spatial navigation performance in older adults. Importantly, a well-established body of literature suggests that cardiorespiratory fitness has measurable effects on neurobiological integrity in the medial temporal lobes, as well as in other brain areas implicated in spatial navigation, such as the precuneus and cerebellum. However, whether cardiorespiratory fitness modulates brain activity in these regions during navigation in older adults remains unknown. Thus, the primary objective of the current study was to examine cardiorespiratory fitness as a modulator of fMRI activity in navigation-linked brain regions in cognitively healthy older adults. To accomplish this objective, cognitively intact participants (N = 22, aged 60–80 years) underwent cardiorespiratory fitness testing to estimate maximal oxygen uptake (V·O2max) and underwent whole-brain high-resolution fMRI while performing a virtual reality navigation task. Our older adult sample demonstrated significant fMRI signal in the right and left retrosplenial cortex, right precuneus, right and left inferior parietal cortex, right and left cerebellum lobule VIIa Crus I and II, right fusiform gyrus, right parahippocampal cortex, right lingual gyrus, and right hippocampus during encoding of a virtual environment. Most importantly, in women but not men (N = 16), cardiorespiratory fitness was positively associated with fMRI activity in the right cerebellum lobule VIIa Crus I and II, but not other navigation-linked brain areas. These findings suggest that the influence of cardiorespiratory fitness on brain function extends beyond the hippocampus, as observed in other work, to the cerebellum lobule VIIa Crus I and II, a component of the cerebellum that has recently been linked to cognition and more specifically, spatial processing.

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