Enhancing Executive Functions in Neurotypical Children with a Four-Week Mobile Serious Games Intervention

Executive functions, which are fundamental to children’s cognitive and academic development, undergo significant maturation during early childhood. This highlights the importance of supporting these pivotal processes from a young age. Recently, the development of serious games designed to train executive functions has become an active area of research. However, most studies have focused on children with deficits, such as those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, leaving the effects in typically developing children largely unexplored. In this work, eight serious games have been developed with the aim of training various executive functions within an academic setting. In a one-month pilot case series study, a group of 16 neurotypical primary school children who engaged with the games showed statistically significant improvements in working memory, inhibition, initiation, planning, task monitoring, and organization of materials, along with a reduction in parental burden. These exploratory results suggest that serious games may represent a promising approach to support executive function development in neurotypical children, addressing a gap in the literature.