Review and Prospect for Chronic Exercise and Cognitive Function——Historical Development from International Perspective

Exercise and cognition studies have become one of the fastest growing research topics in exercise psychology. Yet compared to their research development counterparts in the Western countries, Chinese psychological academic societies are still young, but full of potential, regarding advancing knowledge about this topic. In order to accelerate the development of Chinese academic societies, as well as to link up with the international academic societies involved in this particular discipline, we provide an extensive and thorough array of literature reviews based on the previous research literature in this area. Specifically, this study separately analyzes the main topics or developmental trends concerning the following stages:the sprouting stage (1975—1997) , the meta-analytic and multi-discipline stage (1998—2008) , and the multi-dimensional developmental stage (2009—2016) . Finally, this study provides six aspects of future research directions for the Chinese academic societies. The sincere hope is that this review may provide foundational and cutting edge methods for the Chinese academic societies, thereby enabling their future research in exercise and cognition studies.