Acute exercise and cognitive function: Emerging research issues

The effect of acute exercise, a single bout of exercise, on cognitive performance has attracted much attention. The first narrative review of this literature was conducted by Tomporowski and Ellis.1 In their summary, the authors concluded that acute exercise facilitates cognitive performance; however, they emphasized that the studies at that time were atheoretical and suffered from methodological limitations, making the reliability of the conclusions uncertain. In a meta-analytic review conducted approximately a decade later, Etnier et al.2 concluded that acute exercise results in a positive significant effect on cognitive performance that was of small magnitude (effect size, ES = 0.16).