Effects of the Enriched Sports Activities-Program on Executive Functions in Italian Children

Abstract

Physical activity (PA) during childhood plays an important role in brain development. This role is played in both the structural domain, prefrontal cortex area, and in the functional domain, involving the higher cognitive functions, including the executive functions (EF). Working memory (WM), inhibition, and switching as fundamental EF were investigated in an Italian children sample before and after four months of an Enriched Sports Activities-Program (ESA-Program). EFs were assessed at pre-test and post-test using, respectively, the digit span test, the color word Stroop test, and the trail making test derived from Millisecond Software. The Italian sample was composed of 141 children aged 8.54 years. The intervention group (IG) was composed of 61 children and the control group (CG) of 80 children. Significant differences in WM (p < 0.05) were found in the IG following the ESA-Program intervention. Children’s performance improved both in forward digit span (FDS1 mean difference = 0.26; p = 0.04; FDS2 mean difference = 0.21; p = 0.01) and backward digit span (BDS2 mean difference = 0.14; p = 0.02). No significant improvements were observed for inhibition and switching processes (p > 0.05). Since this finding suggests that brain functioning is sensitive to lifestyle factors, such as PA, an essential goal for ESA-Program is to emphasize the importance of PA to enhance cognitive skills in childhood and prevent sedentary life.

Fostering Holistic Development with a Designed Multisport Intervention in Physical Education: A Class-Randomized Cross-Over Trial

“…Indeed, our intervention focused on cognitive challenge generated by multisport games. While cross-sectional evidence shows that the practice of team sports is consistently associated with better inhibitory performance [ 39 , 40 , 41 ], interventional research mostly failed to find benefits of cognitively enriched sport game interventions for pure measures of inhibition [ 97 , 98 , 99 ].…”

Revista completa

“…Nuestros resultados respaldan los obtenidos en un trabajo desarrollado en sujetos infantiles con obesidad, en el que se consiguieron diferencias significativas en la asociación entre Página 77 la AF y la MT cuando la primera era intensa (Mora- González, et al 2019). También se accede a la misma relación en la investigación realizada por Alesi, et al (2020), al producirse mejoras significativas en la MT del GE cuando se le implementa un programa aumentado de Educación Física.…”

The Effect of an 8-Week Aerobic Dance Program on Executive Function in Children

“…Cognitive flexibility : We measured the children’s cognitive flexibility with the 25 circles version of the Trail-Making Test (TMT; Lezak et al, 2004). Though Retian (1979) described this as an adult version of the TMT, it has been used in many child studies (Alesi et al, 2020; Elghoul et al, 2014; Howie et al, 2015; Ledochowski et al, 2019) and it has been shown to be a valid and appropriate test of cognitive flexibility for children (Howie et al, 2015; Lezak et al, 2004) with moderate test-retest reliability in children (Howie et al, 2015) and an intraclass correlation coefficient of .50–.60. The TMT is comprised of two parts, A and B, each consisting of 25 circles distributed on a sheet of paper (Reitan, 1979).…”