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Review
. 2020 Oct 9;3(1):38.
doi: 10.5334/joc.126.

Mental Fatigue Might Be Not So Bad for Exercise Performance After All: A Systematic Review and Bias-Sensitive Meta-Analysis

Darías Holgado  1   2 , Daniel Sanabria  1   2 , José C Perales  1   2 , Miguel A Vadillo  3
Affiliations
Review

Mental Fatigue Might Be Not So Bad for Exercise Performance After All: A Systematic Review and Bias-Sensitive Meta-Analysis

Darías Holgado et al. J Cogn. .

Erratum in

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate in the scientific community regarding whether a state of mental fatigue may have a negative effect upon a range of objective and subjective measures of human performance. This issue has attracted attention from several fields, including sport and exercise sciences. In fact, a considerable body of literature in the sport science field has suggested that performing a long and demanding cognitive task might lead to a state of mental fatigue, impairing subsequent exercise performance, although research in this field has shown contradictory results. Here, we performed a meta-analysis to investigate these inconsistent findings. The analysis yielded small-to-medium effects of mental fatigue on exercise performance, d z = 0.50, and RPE, d z = 0.21. However, a three-parameter selection model also revealed evidence of publication or reporting biases, suggesting that the bias-corrected estimates might be substantially lower (0.08 and 0.10, respectively) and non-significant. In sum, current evidence does not provide conclusive support for the claim that mental fatigue has a negative influence on exercise performance.

Keywords: Cognitive Control; Executive functions; Statistical analysis; mental effort.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
PRISMA summary of the study selection process.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Forest plot of the effect size of mental fatigue on exercise performance and RPE.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Funnel plot of Cohen’s dz effect size versus study standard error.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Panel A: Funnel plot of the effect sizes meta-analyzed by Brown et al. (2019) and Giboin and Wolff (2019). Panel B: Distribution of effect sizes in the same two meta-analyses across time.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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