Acute and Chronic Physical Activity Increases Creative Ideation Performance: A Systematic Review and Multilevel Meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Physical activity is a health-relevant lifestyle factor associated with various benefits on physical and mental health. Several meta-analyses indicated effects of acute and chronic physical activities on elementary cognitive functions such as executive control processes, memory, and attention. Meta-analytic evidence on the effects of physical activity on creative idea generation, which involves a conglomerate of these elementary cognitive functions, is largely missing. OBJECTIVE: A twofold approach was used to evaluate (1) if there is an association between habitual physical activity and creative ideation and (2) if physical activity interventions (acute and chronic) enhance creative ideation performance. METHODS: Multilevel meta-analytic methods were applied to (1) evaluate the cross-sectional association between creative ideation performance and measures of habitual physical activity and (2) the effect of physical activity on creative ideation performance. Indicators of creative ideation (fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration, or composite score), creativity domain (verbal, figural), population (adults, children), gender, study quality, and publication year served as moderator variables for both meta-analyses. Analyses of intervention studies additionally examined the moderator variables study design (between, within), time of measurement (during, after), and implementation of intervention (acute, chronic). RESULTS: The applied meta-analytic multilevel analysis indicated a medium effect for cross-sectional studies (r = 0.22, SE = 0.06, p = 0.002, 95% CI [0.10–0.34]) based on 17 effects sizes from seven studies. The pooled effects of 28 intervention studies, providing 115 effect sizes, indicated a medium effect size of Hedges’ g = 0.47 (SE = 0.09, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.30–0.65]). Furthermore, a stronger effect was observed for chronic interventions of several days or weeks in comparison with acute interventions of one single bout. CONCLUSION: This study adds important new meta-analytic evidence on the beneficial role of physical activity beyond mental and physical health outcomes: Physical activity has a positive impact on creative ideation, which expands the literature on the role of physical activity in more elementary cognitive functions such as executive control, memory, and attention. Moderator analyses suggested that chronic interventions showed stronger effects than single bouts of physical activity. Rigorously conducted randomized controlled intervention studies and more cross-sectional studies are needed to broaden the evidence in this nascent field of research. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40798-022-00444-9.