Running ahead of the evidence? Rethinking the exercise-cognition consensus after five decades of research

not an empirical study — a meta-scientific critique of the exercise-cognition literature; read in full via the authors' PsyArXiv preprint (10.31234/osf.io/4j69r_v5)

The exercise-cognition research literature itself, across ages including children and adolescents

Invited critical review in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. Not evidence about children; it is evidence about how this field's evidence is produced and cited. Graded C as expert argument rather than data. The published article has no deposited abstract; the full preprint text was read directly.

Two things here bear on how much weight to put on the positive literature. First, the citation pathology is measurable: of 114 Scopus citations of Ciria et al. 2023 as of April 2026, 31 (37%) MISCITE it — typically as claiming positive effects, which is the opposite of its conclusion. Meanwhile Dupuy et al.'s critical commentary on Ciria has 30 citations to the Ciria reply's 8. The consensus is partly a citation artifact. Second, the authors document the standard bias-correction practice in this field as visual funnel-plot inspection plus trim-and-fill, which Carter et al. showed has high false-positive rates and undercorrects. On the specific Ciria-Dupuy exchange, they report that Dupuy et al.'s objections (missing moderators for exercise type, intensity and dose; statistical artifact; incorrect baseline handling; lack of transparency) were answered in Ciria et al.'s 2024 reply by including all the requested moderators without changing the result, and by pointing to the publicly posted materials and open peer reviews. They also invoke Simons et al. and von Bastian et al.: the "brain as a muscle" premise underlying most mechanistic accounts predicts far transfer, and far transfer is the exception, not the rule.

Not addressed. The critique is about publication bias, power and citation behaviour rather than heredity, and its corpus is randomized trials.