BRAIN AND BEHAVIORAL EFFECTS OF A ONE-YEAR VISUAL ARTS INTERVENTION ON EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS AND VISUOSPATIAL ABILITIES IN CHILDREN: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL

The early years of education are critical for the development of executive functions (EF), a set of goal-directed behaviors with a major impact on cognition, daily activities, academic achievement, and mental health. They include working memory (WM), inhibition, flexibility, (core EF), but also planning and reasoning (higher-order EF). Arts-based activities may stimulate EF development, yet visual arts training remains less studied than musical training, especially in longitudinal randomized controlled trials settings. We hypothesized that one year of weekly visual arts (VA) training would lead to stronger gains in EF tasks with a visuospatial component than orchestra in class (OC) training or an active control group (CG) participating in cultural outings. A total of 120 typically developing children aged 6 to 9 years (at baseline) were randomly assigned to VA, OC, or CG. VA and OC groups received 1.5 hours of weekly training, while the CG followed one cultural outing every 6 weeks. Children completed standardized measures of spatial construction (WISC-V: Cubes task), nonverbal spatial reasoning (WISC-V: Matrices task), a selective attention task (U-Cancellation), and a visuospatial n-back working memory task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We validated our fMRI task (Figure 1A), and group-by-time analyses are ongoing. One-year behavioral changes show an advantage of VA over OC on Cubes task performance (beta = 2.06; p = .046, Figure 1B). Further analyses will examine potential changes in brain activity over time and between groups, and their relationships with behavior.