ePoster

Acute bouts of exercise in preschool children do not affect working memory capacity but accelerate the execution of the task

Ivan Serbetar, Martina Bosak, Ivana Antolić
FENS Forum 2024(2024)
Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center, Vienna, Austria

Conference

FENS Forum 2024

Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center, Vienna, Austria

Resources

Authors & Affiliations

Ivan Serbetar, Martina Bosak, Ivana Antolić

Abstract

Except for maintaining weight and reducing health risks during childhood, physicalactivity is important for enhancing children’s mental functioning and cognitive development. Executive function (EF) constitutes supervisory control of cognitive functions to achieve a goal and is mediated via prefrontal cortex circuitry (Davis et al., 2011). EF is necessary for goal-directed behavior, which requires allocation of attention and memory, response selection and inhibition, goal setting, self-control, self-monitoring, and skillful and flexible use of strategies (Eslinger, 1996).The current study attempts to investigate the effects of acute or single bouts of exercise on working memory function.The sample consisted of 89 children aged five, divided into experimental and control groups measured in four sessions over a month. Just before playing the memory game, the experimental group participated in 25 minutes of vigorous exercise consisting mostly of relay races or similar locomotor movement games, while the control group did not exercise before solving the memory game. The Kids memory game, presented on the tablet computer and consisting of six pairs of animals and six pairs of fruits and vegetables images, was used. The number of correctly remembered pairs in 30 seconds was recorded as well as the time needed to find all the pairs of images. Statistical analysis showed that groups did not differ in the number of correctly remembered pairs of images (p > .05); however, the experimental group was on average 3.3 seconds faster in solving the memory game, which was borderline statistically significant (p < .059).

Unique ID: fens-24/acute-bouts-exercise-preschool-children-6dd6cf89