Insufficiently active individuals' electrocortical and self-reported responses to images of exercise of different types and settings

Most people are insufficiently physically active, and their automatic affective valuations of exercise may be a culprit. Physical activity campaigns use exercise images to encourage physical activity, but whether some types of images elicit more positive automatic affective valuations is unclear. Our study investigated whether the type (sport vs. gym) and setting (indoors vs. outdoors) of exercise images influence insufficiently active individuals' automatic affective valuations of them. Specifically, we recorded electroencephalography from insufficiently active participants while they completed an oddball task wherein exercise images of different settings and types were embedded among positive, neutral, and negative non-exercise images. We extracted the P3b event-related potential component elicited by the exercise images to measure automatic affective valuations of the images. We also recorded participants' self-reported evaluations of the images to measure explicit affective responses. The results of a mixed-effects model indicated that P3b amplitude was larger for outdoors and gym exercise images than indoors and sport exercise images, respectively, but these effects did not depend on whether the images were embedded among positive, neutral, or negative non-exercise images. This suggests the setting and type of exercise images influenced the degree to which they were cognitively processed but not their automatic affective valuation. We also found exercise images were explicitly perceived as neutral-to-positive and their setting and type did not affect this explicit affective evaluation. In summary, for insufficiently active individuals, the setting and type of exercise images were found to influence their cognitive processing but not their automatic or explicit affective evaluation.