Do not underestimate the cognitive benefits of exercise
Dupuy O, Ludyga S, Ortega FB, Hillman CH, Erickson KI, Herold FA, Kamijo K, Wang CH, Morris TP, Brown BM, Esteban-Cornejo I, Solis-Urra P, Bosquet L, Gerber M, Mekari S, Berryman N, Bherer L, Rattray B, Liu-Ambrose T, Voelcker-Rehage C, Cheval B · 2024
grade Ccritiqueindependentnot-applicable
Sample
not read — see design_notes
Population
Not applicable — a Matters Arising commentary on Ciria et al. 2023
Design
ACCESS FAILURE, STATED PLAINLY. This is the principal published rebuttal to Ciria et al. 2023, signed by 21 of the field's leading investigators. Nature Human Behaviour deposits no abstract for it with Crossref, Europe PMC or Semantic Scholar, and the article page redirects to an authentication gateway; no preprint or repository copy was located. We could not read it. What is recorded below is secondhand characterization from Sanabria et al. 2026, who summarize the exchange, and it is flagged as unverified. It is filed as a known unread lead, not as evidence, and it is not cited from the topic page.
Key findings
NOT VERIFIED AGAINST THE PAPER. Per Sanabria et al. 2026, the objections were: that Ciria et al. omitted key moderators (exercise type, intensity, dose); that the near-null outcome might be a statistical artifact; that the handling of baseline performance was incorrect; and that the analysis lacked transparency. The same source reports that Ciria et al.'s 2024 reply added all the requested moderators without changing the result, reported both frequentist and Bayesian analyses under multiple publication-bias methods, and noted that all materials (osf.io/e9zqf) and the journal peer reviews are public. The commentary is the more-cited half of the exchange (30 citations to the reply's 8), which is itself part of why the positive consensus persists.
Genetic confound
Not applicable — a methodological commentary, not an empirical study.
Effects
| Outcome | Metric | Value | Measure | Timing | Vs | Horizon | Class |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Objections raised against Ciria et al. 2023 (secondhand, unverified) | qualitative | missing moderators; possible statistical artifact; incorrect baseline handling; lack of transparency | unknown | n/a | none | not-applicable | unclear |