Short-term effects of physical and cognitive activity on selective attention in preschool children

This study examined how different activity types, high-intensity physical activity (HI-PA), moderate-intensity physical activity (MI-PA), and sedentary cognitively engaging activity (CA), influence distraction resistance in preschool children. Given the developmental immaturity of attentional control systems at this age, the study aimed to assess whether acute activity could enhance children's ability to filter irrelevant stimuli across visual and auditory modalities. Thirty-one preschool children (M age = 5.38, SD = 0.44) participated in a within-subjects experiment involving two computerized attention tasks: a visual search task with salient cartoon distractors, and an auditory oddball task. Each child completed the tasks following three intervention conditions (HI-PA, MI-PA, CA) and a pre-activity baseline. Reaction times (RTs) were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. In the visual task, distractors slowed RTs (F = 33.59, p < .001). Post-activity RTs were faster than baseline for all three conditions (pre vs. HI-PA: d = 0.98; pre vs. MI-PA: d = 0.82; pre vs. CA: d = 0.80), with no reliable differences among post-activity conditions. In the oddball task, post-activity responses were faster than baseline and HI-PA conferred an additional benefit over CA; deviant presence did not affect performance. Findings support that brief, feasible classroom activities, physical or sedentary-cognitive, enhance general attentional readiness in preschoolers, while strong bottom-up distraction remains hard to override acutely. This has implications for the design of low-cost, developmentally appropriate interventions targeting attention in early education. • Brief classroom activities improved attention-related response speed in preschoolers. • Salient visual distractors impaired performance regardless of activity condition. • No clear differences emerged among post-activity conditions in the visual task. • Deviant sounds did not disrupt performance in the auditory oddball task.