“Still No Evidence That Exergames Improve Cognitive Ability: A Commentary on Et Al 2017”, 2021-04-01 (; backlinks):
A recent meta-analysis claims that exergames exert a positive effect on cognition.—However, this meta-analysis suffers from severe technical issues.—Our reanalysis shows that the impact of exergames on cognition is small or null.—Thus, there is still no evidence of exergames’ benefits on overall cognition.
A recent meta-analysis ( et al 2017) claimed that exergames exert medium-size positive effects on people’s overall cognitive function. The present article critically tests this claim.
We argue that the meta-analysis reported inflated effect-sizes mainly for 3 reasons: (1) some effect sizes were miscalculated; (2) there was an excessive amount of true heterogeneity; and (3) no publication-bias-corrected estimates were provided.
We have thus recalculated the effect sizes and reanalyzed the data using a more robust approach and more sophisticated techniques. Compared to et al 2017 our models show that: (1) the overall effect sizes are substantially smaller; (2) the amount of true heterogeneity, when any, is much lower; and (3) the publication-bias analyses suggest that the actual effect of exergames on overall cognitive function is slim to null.
Therefore, the cognitive benefits of exergames are far from being established.
[Keywords: aging, cognitive training, exergames, meta-analysis]