Determining Whether Tennis Benefits the Updating Function in Young Children: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study

Abstract

This study aimed at investigating the behavioral and neuro-electrical impacts of a coordinative exercise intervention on the updating function of the working memory (WM) in young children. Children in the experimental group was tested on the 1-back working memory task before and after a coordinative exercise program that involved a 60 min session twice per week for eight weeks (totally 16 sessions), while the control group underwent routine classroom activities with the same WM tests. The results showed that the hit rates of performing the 1-back task increased significantly in the experimental group compared with that of the control group. The experimental group demonstrated a larger decrease in both reaction time and false alarm rates from pre-test to post-test than the control group. Physical fitness improved after exercise intervention in the experimental group. Neural adaptations due to the exercise training were evaluated using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and the results indicated that the experimental group experienced a greater cortical oxygenated hemoglobin (Oxy-Hb) increase in the prefrontal area after the intervention than the control group. These results suggest that coordinative exercises are beneficial for improving WM as well as reaction time and physical fitness in young children.

The effects of motor skill and physical activity interventions on preschoolers' cognitive and academic skills: A systematic review

“…Laurent et al, 2018;Xiong et al, 2017) reported both withdrawals and drop-outs in terms of numbers and reasons. Thirty-one (89%) of the included studies were found to be underpowered to detect a medium effect size, and only nine of the included studies reported having conducted a priori power analyses (Raney et al, 2017;Jarraya et al, 2019;Habibi et al, 2014;Gao et al, 2019;Lai et al, 2020;Stein et al, 2017;Wen et al, 2018;Xiong et al, 2019a;Have et al, 2018); of which only one was adequately powered (Have et al, 2018) Note. Some modifications were made to the EPHPP tool to solve misunderstandings between the raters.…”

“…Of these, only two studies (Sánchez-López et al, 2019;Shoval et al, 2018) used outcome measures that were shown to be valid, while three studies (Mavilidi et al, 2016a;Mavilidi et al, 2017a;Mavilidi et al, 2018a) used outcome measures that were shown to be reliable. Six of these studies (Jarraya et al, 2019;Stein et al, 2017;Lai et al, 2020;Botha and Africa, 2020;Mavilidi et al, 2015;Toumpaniari et al, 2015) used outcome measures that were neither shown to be valid or reliable. The studies that received a strong rating in the data collection methods section demonstrated medium effects in three studies (Callcott et al, 2015b;Gao et al, 2019;Xiong et al, 2019a), small effects in one study (Callcott et al, 2015b), and trivial effects in one study (Xiong et al, 2019b).…”

“…and five stated low statistical power as a limitation of the study (Gao et al, 2019;Jarraya et al, 2019;Lai et al, 2020;Wen et al, 2018;Xiong et al, 2019a).…”

“…In terms of the intervention effects (see Supplementary Table S2), twelve of the included studies assessed executive functions as an outcome variable; three with combined interventions (Gao et al, 2019;Have et al, 2018;Beck et al, 2016) and nine with FMS and/or PA only interventions (Chang et al, 2013;Ellemberg and St-Louis-Deschênes, 2010;Fisher et al, 2011;Jarraya et al, 2019;Lai et al, 2020;Stein et al, 2017;Wen et al, 2018;Xiong et al, 2017;Xiong et al, 2019a). 1 Two of the three (67%) combined interventions (Gao et al, 2019;Beck et al, 2016), and eight out of nine (89%) FMS and/or PA only interventions (Chang et al, 2013;Ellemberg and St-Louis-Deschênes, 2010;Fisher et al, 2011;Jarraya et al, 2019;Lai et al, 2020;Stein et al, 2017;Xiong et al, 2017;Xiong et al, 2019a) demonstrated significant effects. The effect sizes were medium (d = 0.50-0.68, x‾ 0.59) for FMS and/or PA only interventions and ranged from trivial to large for combined interventions (d = 0.12-1.47, x‾ 0.68).…”

Motor Development Research: II. The First Two Decades of the 21st Century Shaping Our Future

“…Additionally, the layers of the scalp and skull of young children are still thin, providing better conditions for measuring cerebral blood flow changes. Due to these advantages, researchers have used fNIRS, for example, to better understand task-related brain activity in infants reaching and walking (e.g., Nishiyori et al, 2016), in typically developing children (Lai et al, 2020;Liang et al, 2016;Mazzoli et al, 2019), and children with disabilities such as developmental coordination disorder (e.g. Caçola et al, 2018;Plumb et al, in press), and autism (e.g., Getchell & Liang, 2018;Kaur et al, 2018).…”