Having physical activities and exercise programs after school can do wonders for the cognition abilities of children aged between 7 and 9 years.
The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and included 221 prepubescent children. Half of the children were randomly assigned to the after-school program and the rest were placed on a wait list. All participants underwent cognitive testing and brain imaging before and after the intervention.
Researchers found that those who engaged in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for at least 60 minutes a day after school saw substantial improvements in their ability to pay attention, avoid distraction and switch between cognitive tasks.
"Those in the exercise group received a structured intervention that was designed for the way kids like to move. They performed short bouts of exercise interspersed with rest over a two-hour period," said University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Charles Hillman, who led the study, in a press statement. "On average, kids' heart rates corresponded with a moderate-to-vigorous level of exercise intensity, and they averaged about 4,500 steps during the two-hour intervention. The children were active about 70 minutes per day. We saw about a six percent increase in fitness in children in the FITKids intervention group," Hillman said. Fitness improved less than one percent in the wait-list control group.
The researchers also noted that children who exercised also showed substantial increases in "attentional inhibition" and improved "cognitive flexibility." Contrarily, children in the wait-list control group saw minimal improvements in these measures, in line with what would be expected as a result of normal maturation over the nine months.
"Kids in the intervention group improved two-fold compared to the wait-list kids in terms of their accuracy on cognitive tasks. And we found widespread changes in brain function, which relate to the allocation of attention during cognitive tasks and cognitive processing speed. These changes were significantly greater than those exhibited by the wait-list kids," the study authors stated. "Interestingly, the improvements observed in the FITKids intervention were correlated with their attendance rate, such that greater attendance was related to greater change in brain function and cognitive performance."
The drawback of this study is that researchers didn't distinguish improvements that were the result of increased fitness from those that might stem from the social interactions, stimulation and engagement the children in the intervention group experienced.
Findings of the study were published online in the journal Pediatrics. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health funded this research.
