مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد مشارکت ورزشی و هوشیاری در کودکان – الزویر 2018

Vigilance or sustained attention is the capacity to maintain attention over time and to react efficiently to relevant stimuli.1 The study of vigilance is highly important because optimal levels of this capacity are necessary in many daily life activities such as driving,2 performing efficiently in certain work settings, 3,4 and attending to academic lessons. In fact, a positive relationship has been found between sustained attention and academic achievement in children.5 Individual differences in terms of regular practice of exercise have been related to vigilance across the lifespan.6–10 These findings are in line with the positive relationship between exercise and cognitive processing reported in the exercisecognition literature.11,12 Nonetheless, just few studies have directly addressed the relationship between regular practice of exercise and sustained attention in children. Some studies have focused on the role of cardiovascular fitness on the cognition-exercise relationship. For instance, Pontifex et al.13 showed fewer errors of omission in a flanker task14 in high-fitness 9–10 years old children than in their lowfitness counterparts, a result that was taken as a piece of evidence of superior sustained attention capacities in the high-fit group. The positive relationship between aerobic fitness and sustained attention in children has also been supported by a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.15 Taken together, these results are consistent with the cardiovascular fitness hypothesis,16,17 which suggests that cardiovascular fitness is the physiological mediator that explains the cognitive benefits of regular exercise. Researchers have also investigated the influence of different sport expertise on the relationship between regular exercise and vigilance performance in children. However, the empirical evidence is limited, to the best of our knowledge, to 1 study with adolescents,6 and young adults (Lum et al.7 ). Ballester et al.6 showed better performance in the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) of a group of football players compared with their agematched controls. Importantly, vigilance performance did not correlate with the cardiovascular fitness level of the participants. Taken together, these results seem to be consistent with the cognitive component skills hypothesis18,19 which considers “sport training as a medium for experience dependent brain plasticity, or cognitive training, that results in more efficient brain networks (both general and sport-specific)” (Voss et al. 19, page 1021). This rationale is in line with the “cognitive skill transfer”20 and the “broad transfer”21 hypotheses, which suggest that learning and practicing certain activities may lead to adaptations in basic cognitive abilities that in turn can transfer to different skills in other domains.