The Association of Childhood Fitness to Proactive and Reactive Action Monitoring.

Keita Kamijo,Hiroaki Masaki,Seongryu Bae,Francesco Di Russo

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150691

Abstract

Several studies have claimed that the positive association between childhood fitness and cognitive control is attributable to differences in the child’s cognitive control strategy, which can involve either proactive or reactive control. The present study tested this hypothesis by manipulating the probability of trial types during a modified flanker task. Preadolescent children performed mostly congruent and mostly incongruent conditions of the flanker task, with post-error task performance and error negativity/error-related negativity (Ne/ERN) being assessed. Results indicated that greater aerobic fitness was related to greater post-error accuracy and larger Ne/ERN amplitudes in the mostly congruent condition. These findings suggest that higher-fit children might be able to transiently upregulate cognitive control by recruiting reactive control in the mostly congruent condition. Further, greater fitness was related to greater modulation of Ne/ERN amplitude between conditions, suggesting that higher-fit children engaged in more proactive control in the mostly incongruent condition. This study supports the hypothesis that greater childhood fitness is associated with a more flexible shift between reactive and proactive modes of cognitive control to adapt to varying task demands.

Highlights

For over a decade and a half, it has become increasingly clear that regular physical activity can promote brain health and improve cognitive function in adult populations [1,2,3]
The correlation analysis revealed that greater fitness was related to greater post-error accuracy for the mostly congruent (MC) condition, r = .28, p = .035, whereas no such relationship was observed for the mostly incongruent (MI) condition, r = .12, p =
The correlation analysis revealed that greater fitness was related to larger negativity/error-related negativity (Ne/error-related negativity (ERN)) amplitude for the MC condition, r = –.43, p = .004, whereas no such relationship was observed for the MI condition, r = –.18, p = .27 (Table 2)

Summary

Introduction

For over a decade and a half, it has become increasingly clear that regular physical activity can promote brain health and improve cognitive function in adult populations [1,2,3]. Most previous studies have employed cross-sectional designs that compared cognitive performance across lower-fit and higher-fit children, recent longitudinal randomized controlled intervention studies have provided evidence of a causal link between physical activity and changes in cognitive function [6,7,8]. These longitudinal studies indicated that a physical activity intervention leading to increases in aerobic fitness improves higher-order cognitive function, known as cognitive control, in preadolescent children. In light of the worldwide epidemic of childhood inactivity [9, 10], the link between childhood fitness and cognitive control should be further clarified

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Discussion

Conclusion