Creativity in Motion: How a Single Aerobic Exercise Session Affects Divergent Creative Thinking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Creativity, a key cognitive process for innovation, involves generating novel and valuable ideas. While aerobic exercise is linked to cognitive benefits, its effects on creative thinking remain unclear. Evidence suggests that both single and consecutive exercise sessions may enhance creative thinking, yet the optimal intensity and timing of exercise for benefiting creative thinking have not been fully explored. This study examined whether a 20 minute moderate-to-vigorous cycle session influences divergent creative thinking, and how timing of assessment affects performance. Fifty-one young adults completed Guilford's Alternate Uses Task (AUT) under three conditions: post-exercise, during exercise, or control (after watching an exercise video). AUT performance was measured by fluency (number of ideas), validity (practicality of ideas), flexibility (number of categories), and originality (creativity ratings on a 1-5 scale). No significant differences between the control and post-exercise groups were found. However, those assessed during exercise showed lower originality, fluency, and validity, likely due to dual-task interference. These findings suggest that a 20 minute aerobic session does not enhance creativity and may hinder it when assessed during exercise. The study highlights the need for further research to clarify how exercise intensity, duration, and timing impact creative thinking to optimize potential cognitive benefits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".