The effects of acute exercise on cognitive performance: a meta-analysis

79 studies, 1,034 effect sizes

Mixed ages across the lifespan; not restricted to children

Meta-analysis of single-bout exercise effects on cognitive performance, partitioned into three timing paradigms (during exercise, immediately after, after a delay), with moderator analysis for exercise duration and intensity, cognitive-task type and participant fitness. Graded C — mixed-quality primary studies, no selection-model bias adjustment, and the population is not age-restricted, so it speaks to the acute phenomenon rather than to schoolchildren specifically.

The canonical acute-exercise result, and it is tiny and transient. Overall g=0.097. The three paradigms are indistinguishable: during exercise g=0.101 (95% CI 0.041 to 0.160), immediately after g=0.108 (0.069 to 0.147), after a delay g=0.103 (0.035 to 0.170). Effects of this size on laboratory cognitive tasks measured minutes after a bout of exercise are an arousal phenomenon, not an achievement lever: they are roughly a quarter of the effect of a single year of ordinary schooling on standardized achievement, they are measured on reaction-time and accuracy tasks rather than on learning, and nothing in this literature shows the transient state converts into retained knowledge. Later youth-specific work (Dixon et al. 2025) finds even this small effect absent in preadolescents.

Within-subject and randomized-order acute designs are not genetically confounded. Participant fitness appears as a MODERATOR, which is an observational contrast within these studies and is confounded by the heritability of fitness.