ReviewFrontiers in psychology2016
The Central Governor Model of Exercise Regulation Teaches Us Precious Little about the Nature of Mental Fatigue and Self-Control Failure.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 73 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of Nutritional Interventions on Accuracy and Reaction Time with Relevance to Mental Fatigue in Sporting, Military, and Aerospace Populations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Pooled it
- A Hitchhiker's Guide to Physical and Cognitive Effort.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Review
- Understanding mechanisms of voluntary engagement of mental effort using active inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Kinematic Analysis of the Lower Limb in Uchi-Mata: Comparison Between Elite Athletes Specializing and Non-Specializing.Journal of functional morphology and kinesiology · 2025Article
- Clinical Decision-Making and Use of Clinical Decision Support When Clinicians are Fatigued in an Emergency Department: A Qualitative Study.Applied clinical informatics · 2025Article
- The Effect of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Basketball Performance-A Scoping Review.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Review
- An Integrated Perspective of Effort and Perception of Effort.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2024Review
- Emotional self-regulation and personality in the light of Thomas Aquinas's philosophical anthropology.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The effects of facilitatory and inhibitory kinesiotaping of Vastus Medialis on the activation and fatigue of superficial quadriceps muscles.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- State of Knowledge on Molecular Adaptations to Exercise in Humans: Historical Perspectives and Future Directions.Comprehensive Physiology · 2022Article
- Methods for improving thermal tolerance in military personnel prior to deployment.Military Medical Research · 2020Review
- Glutamine-to-glutamate ratio in the nucleus accumbens predicts effort-based motivated performance in humans.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2020Article
- Impact of Weekly Physical Activity on Stress Response: An Experimental Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- A Schema-Activation Approach to Failure and Success in Self-Control.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- In-Match Physical Performance Fluctuations in International Rugby Sevens Competition.Journal of sports science & medicine · 2019Article
- Time-trial performance is not impaired in either competitive athletes or untrained individuals following a prolonged cognitive task.European journal of applied physiology · 2019Article
- Bridging Exercise Science, Cognitive Psychology, and Medical Practice: Is "Cognitive Fatigue" a Remake of "The Emperor's New Clothes"?Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Is Attention Really Effort? Revisiting Daniel Kahneman's Influential 1973 BookFrontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- The Role of Self-Control and Motivation on Exhaustion in Youth Athletes: A Longitudinal Perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- A temporary deficiency in self-control: Can heightened motivation overcome this effect?Psychophysiology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Self-control is considered broadly important for many domains of life. One of its unfortunate features, however, is that it tends to wane over time, with little agreement about why this is the case. Recently, there has been a push to address this problem by looking to the literature in exercise physiology, specifically the work on the central governor model of physical fatigue. Trying to explain how and why mental performance wanes over time, the central governor model suggests that exertion is throttled by some central nervous system mechanism that receives information about energetic bodily needs and motivational drives to regulate exertion and, ultimately, to prevent homeostatic breakdown, chiefly energy depletion. While we admire the spirit of integration and the attempt to shed light on an important topic in psychology, our concern is that the central governor model is very controversial in exercise physiology, with increasing calls to abandon it altogether, making it a poor fit for psychology. Our concerns are threefold. First, while we agree that preservation of bodily homeostasis makes for an elegant ultimate account, the fact that such important homeostatic concerns can be regularly overturned with even slight incentives (e.g., a smile) renders the ultimate account impotent and points to other ultimate functions for fatigue. Second, despite the central governor being thought to take as input information about the metabolic needs of the body, there is no credible evidence that mental effort actually consumes inordinate amounts of energy that are not already circulating in the brain. Third, recent modifications of the model make the central governor appear like an all-knowing homunculus and unfalsifiable in principle, thus contributing very little to our understanding of why people tend to disengage from effortful tasks over time. We note that the latest models in exercise physiology have actually borrowed concepts and models from psychology to understand physical performance.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.