The Effects Of Sensitivity Exercise And Coordination Exercise On 5-6-year Preschool Children's Executive Functions

Background:It has been widely accepted that exercise can benefit children's physical and mental health.In recent years,research in psychology and education shows that exercise can promote children's cognitive development,especially the development of executive functions.As advanced cognitive functions,Executive functions consist of three core components:inhibitory control,working memory and cognitive flexibility.The important role that executive functions play on the individual cognitive,the emotional and social development,makes it a hot research topic in many fields for a decade or two years.Preschool period is the critical period for executive functions' formation and development,and it could be a perfect time window for promoting executive functions.Additionally,a growing number of studies have confirmed the positive prediction of executive functions in early childhood on individual's school performances and emotional regulation.Thus,taking effective measures to improve preschool children's executive functions is of great significance.Unfortunately,the current researches about the relationship between exercise and development of children's executive functions is scarce,furthermore,those researches haven't explore the influence of age and type of exercise on the intervention effect.Objective:To investigate the relationship between exercise and the development of children's executive functions,to explore the effect difference between sensitivity and coordination exercise on the development of children's executive functions,as well as the effects of age on the exercise intervention of executive functions,to help find better way for pronoting the development of executive functions of preschool children.Methods:The present study adopts multi-factor experimental design involving senior and middle classes children as the objects,explore the effect of age(senior class,middle class)and exercise type(sensitivity exercise,coordination exercise,control)on the effects of executive functions' exercise interventions.Children of two grade are randomly assigned to:the sensitivity exercise group,the coordination exercise group,the control group.Children of senior class and middle class in the sensitivity exercise group take part in sensitivity exercise plan for 8 weeks;at the same time,the children of senior class and middle class in the coordination exercise group take part in coordination exercise plan for 8 weeks.Before and after the plan,all the children take the executive functions test twice,the task contains space arrow conflict task,working memory span task,self-order instruction task,flexible item selection task.Compare the score change of different groups between pretest and posttest on children's executive functions.Results:The result of executive functions pretest indicates,(1)the difference of pretest scores between senior class children and middle class children on inhibitory control is significant,the accuracy of senior class is higher than middle class,the reaction time of middle class is longer than senior class;(2)the difference of pretest scores between senior class children and middle class children on working memory is not significant;(3)the difference of pretest scores between senior class children and middle class children in cognitive flexibility is not significant.Using age and exercise types as independent variables,the change of children's executive functions test scores on the three subcomponents as indicators of the dependent variable,the results of completely multi-factor variance analysis,indicate that:(4)on the reaction time of inhibitory control,the main effect of age is not significant,the main effect of exercise types is not significant,the interaction of the two factors is not significant;on the accuracy of inhibitory control,the main effect of age is not significant,the main effect of exercise types is not significant,the interaction of the two factors is not significant.(5)on working memory,the main effect of exercise types is significant,the sensitivity of exercise group and the control group have significant difference on change of working memory;the interaction between the exercise types and age is narrowly significant,simple effect analysis shows an significant difference between the sensitivity exercise group of middle class and the coordination exercise group of middle class or the control group of middle class;but no difference found among groups of the senior class;the main effect of age is not significant.(6)on cognitive flexibility,the main effect of age is not significant,the main effect of exercise types is not significant,the interaction of the two factors is not significant.Conclusion:From 5 to 6 years old,preschool children's executive functions develop with the growth of the age,especially the component of inhibitory control.Different types of exercise have a different impact on children's executive functions:sensitivity exercise can improve children's working memory,coordination exercise show no positive benefit on children's executive functions.Additionally,Sensitivity exercise have a different influence on the executive functions of children at different ages.