Abstract
There is growing evidence indicating positive, causal effects of acute physical activity on cognitive performance of school children, adolescents, and adults. However, only a few studies examined these effects in kindergartners, even though correlational studies suggest moderate relationships between motor and cognitive functions in this age group. One aim of the present study was to examine the correlational relationships between motor and executive functions among 5- to 6-year-olds. Another aim was to test whether an acute coordinative intervention, which was adapted to the individual motor functions of the children, causally affected different executive functions (i.e., motor inhibition, cognitive inhibition, and shifting). Kindergartners (N = 102) were randomly assigned either to a coordinative intervention (20 min) or to a control condition (20 min). The coordination group performed five bimanual exercises (e.g., throwing/kicking balls onto targets with the right and left hand/foot), whereas the control group took part in five simple activities that hardly involved coordination skills (e.g., stamping). Children’s motor functions were assessed with the Movement Assessment Battery for Children 2 (Petermann, 2009) in a pre-test (T1), 1 week before the intervention took place. Motor inhibition was assessed with the Simon says task (Carlson and Wang, 2007), inhibition and shifting were assessed with the Hearts and Flowers task (Davidson et al., 2006) in the pre-test and again in a post-test (T2) immediately after the interventions. Results revealed significant correlations between motor functions and executive functions (especially shifting) at T1. There was no overall effect of the intervention. However, explorative analyses indicated a three-way interaction, with the intervention leading to accuracy gains only in the motor inhibition task and only if it was tested directly after the intervention. As an unexpected effect, this result needs to be treated with caution but may indicate that the effect of acute coordinative exercise is temporally limited and emerges only for motor inhibition, but not for cognitive inhibition or shifting. More generally, in contrast to other studies including older participants and endurance exercises, no general effect of an acute coordinative intervention on executive functions was revealed for kindergartners.
Highlights
Children’s increasing use of technological devices, such as smartphones or computers, promotes a sedentary lifestyle at least in industrial societies
Mean accuracy and reaction time of all three executive function tasks for both times of measurement as well as z-standardized scores of the motor functions for T1 are presented in Table 2, separately for each experimental condition
Two preliminary MANOVAs were calculated to check whether children of the coordinative intervention and the control condition differed at T1 concerning their performance in the motor function tasks and the executive function tasks
Summary
Children’s increasing use of technological devices, such as smartphones or computers, promotes a sedentary lifestyle at least in industrial societies. Intervention studies suggested that both acute (i.e., one-time) and chronic (i.e., repeated) physical exercise may cause beneficial effects on subsequent cognitive functions of children aged older than 6 years, adolescents, and adults (for a metaanalysis, see Sibley and Etnier, 2003; Verburgh et al, 2014). These positive effects of physical activity on cognitive functions can be explained by physiological and developmental mechanisms: First, physical activity might elicit physiological changes, such as enhancing the cerebral blood flow (e.g., Herholz et al, 1987) and increasing the release of neurotransmitters – factors that are assumed to positively affect cognitive functions (Chmura et al, 1998; Winter et al, 2007). It would be suggestive to use the relationship between motor and cognitive functions to enhance one or the other by means of interventions
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