Children who move less and have more screen time are more likely to experience problems with health, behavior, and response inhibition. It challenges the educational process, family relationships, and the children's emotional well-being. But can this be reversed with specialized interventions of physical activity?

This study aimed to investigate the effects of physical exercise programs on the executive functions of 4-6-year-olds. We administered cognitive tests to evaluate the children’s working memory, switching, and inhibition skills, and the parents filled out the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), before and after the intervention. During the 10-week program, preschoolers were assigned into three groups: (1) experimental (E), who performed specialized exercises daily, incorporating aerobic activity and cognitive elements; (2) active control (AC), who performed simple aerobic exercises daily; and (3) passive control (PC), who did not do additional exercises.

101 preschoolers participated in our study (E N=35, AC N=32, PC N=34). The E and AC groups showed larger improvements on tests that measure inhibition, shifting attention, and cognitive control. The effect sizes for changes in the Head-legs test performance were medium (d=0.503 (E), d=0.520 (AC), and d=0.313 (PC)), and for the changes in the level reached on the Figure School test the effect sizes were medium to high (d=0.509 (E), d=0.868 (AC), and d=0.271 (PC)). Moderate decreases in scores on the SDQ’s Social and Behavioral subscales were observed in the AC group (d=0.355 and d=0.332), however, non-significant.

Our sample was limited to urban children who regularly engage in extracurricular activities, thus such interventions could yield larger effects in preschoolers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

We conclude that daily physical activity improves some aspects of preschooler’s executive functions, but no differences were observed between specialized exercises and general aerobic activity. The results of this study can be used to formulate recommendations for educational institutions.

The present study hypothesized that executive functions during preschool can impact creative thinking, which includes both divergent and convergent thinking. While young children are naturally creative, often taking divergent and unexpected actions without much planning, little is known about early convergent thinking. This study focused on the emergence of convergent thinking during preschool years and how executive functions are associated with this ability.

A total of 151 children (73 girls) aged between 3 and 6 years participated in this study. Three executive functions—updating, inhibition, and shifting—were measured as predictor variables. Convergent thinking was assessed using a child version of Danker's candle task, which required children to use a common tool in an unconventional way to achieve a solution. Responses were evaluated based on the completeness of the solution, as well as the uniqueness and relevance of the ideas presented. Responses were coded at four levels, with the highest level for the complete solution and grading for uniqueness and relevance.

Task performance was compared across three age groups (mean ages of 4, 5, and 6). The oldest group outperformed the youngest group: Welch’s ANOVA, F(2, 97.8) = 6.51, p = .002, indicating age-related differences in convergent thinking skills during the preschool period. Controlling for age and gender variables, the regression model indicated that the executive function of shifting, measured by DCCS (Zelazo, 2006), is a significant predictor of convergent thinking. These findings suggest that creative thinking already has cognitive associations in preschool years and that flexibility is an important ability for creative problem solving.

Executive functions (EFs) are top-down cognitive control processes that regulate thought and behavior. Previous studies have highlighted that these functions, including inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and attentional control, are crucial for managing complex linguistic tasks and are linked to children’s pragmatic language (PL) development (Matthews et al., 2018). PL refers to the ability to effectively use communication strategies in social interactions. Given the essential role of EFs in language and communication processing, this study aimed to explore the relationship between EF and PL in a sample of 79 school-aged children (mean age = 9.7 years; SD = 0.60 years; 47 boys). General intellectual ability was assessed using Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices, and PL was measured through the Colour Game sub-test of the APL-Medea. Specific EF components were evaluated using the following tasks: inhibition was assessed with the numerical Stroop task and the Trail Making Test, working memory with the backward span test, and cognitive flexibility with the Tower of London test. Correlation analyses revealed significant associations between PL and two EF components: working memory (r=0.32; p=0.03) and inhibition (r = 0.36; p = 0.01). Regression analysis showed that only inhibition component predicts the PL competences. Findings from this study suggest that working memory and inhibitory control are significantly associated with PL skills. Working memory plays a key role in holding and manipulating information, essential for constructing complex sentences, maintaining conversational turn-taking, and understanding communicative intent. The main role to support the PL is performed by inhibitory control. This mechanism filters out irrelevant information and attend to social cues, facilitating appropriate language use in different contexts. Although preliminary, these results underline the importance of EFs in PL competence. Future studies with larger samples will apply advanced methods, such as network analysis, to further investigate this relationship.

Previous research on preschool children's verbal working memory and spoken language skills has shown different results. It is still unclear whether better spoken language helps verbal working memory, memory helps language, or if they influence each other equally. However, spoken language skills connected to verbal working memory are important for children's social adjustment in preschool and possibly for their self-confidence.

The research was conducted to find out how spoken language and verbal working memory are related to the self-confidence of 4–5-year-old children attending preschool. The study included 140 children (51% girls and 49% boys; 36% aged four and 64% aged five), 140 parents, and 17 teachers. To assess children's spoken language, parents filled out the Preschool Children's Spoken Language Assessment Scale, created by the author and supervisor. Children's verbal working memory was measured with three semantic category fluency tasks where they had to name words from different categories (Rodrigues, Kumaraswamy & Ganiga, 2021). Teachers completed a questionnaire about children's self-confidence, based on a modified version of the Children's Emotional Adjustment Scale—Preschool Version (Thorlacius & Gudmundsson, 2019).

The data were processed using SPSS 23.0 and AMOS software. Descriptive statistics included the mean, standard deviation, mode, median, minimum, and maximum. Data distribution and normality were assessed via skewness, kurtosis, Mahalanobis distance, and the Shapiro–Wilk test. Group differences (gender, age, parental employment) were tested using Student’s t-test. Mediation analysis was performed using path analysis with a significance level of p < 0.05.

The results showed that 5-year-olds demonstrated stronger spoken language, verbal working memory, and self-confidence than 4-year-olds. Gender and parental employment had no significant impact. Path analysis confirmed that verbal working memory directly predicted self-confidence without mediation by spoken language skills (passive and active vocabulary, comprehension, expression). In conclusion, higher verbal working memory is linked to greater self-confidence in preschool-aged children.

According to the adaptive account of human memory, natural selection has shaped memory systems to prioritize the retention of information relevant to survival and reproduction (i.e., fitness-relevant information). Consistent with this view, a substantial body of research indicates that fitness-relevant entities (e.g., animate and threatening entities) are more readily recalled than nonfitness-relevant entities (e.g., inanimate and nonthreatening entities). However, most research investigating these memory biases has focused on adult populations, leaving a gap in understanding how these biases develop during childhood. Additionally, while existing studies conducted in adults have primarily examined item memory, little research has investigated whether these biases extend to location memory—a critical adaptive component of human cognition. To address these gaps, the present research examines whether children exhibit memory biases for fitness-relevant information in location memory. To this end, two experiments were designed to test whether animates (Experiment 1) and threats (Experiment 2) could benefit from a processing advantage in location memory. In these experiments, children aged 5, 8, and 10 years were asked to play Memory games on a digital tablet. As a measure of location memory, we recorded the number of errors made in matching pairs of cards, as well as the mean Euclidean distance between the correct location of the target and the location of the selected card in cases of error. At the end of the game session, incidental recall of the stimuli displayed in the games was also tested. Notably, results revealed a significant effect of animacy on free recall but not on location memory, whereas a significant threat effect was observed in both free recall and location memory. Some age-related effects were observed for both biases. These findings will be discussed in light of their implications for understanding the developmental trajectories of fitness-relevant memory biases.