Children's strategic behavior on a measure of executive functioning

Abstract

There is growing support for the notion that aerobic exercise selectively benefits executive functions (EF). Although several physiological mechanisms have been proposed, the hypothesis that aerobic exercise benefits children’s executive functioning via changes in strategic behavior has not been tested. The focus of this study was to reexamine for possible mediation by strategy use data (Davis et al., 2007; under review) that demonstrated that aerobic exercise selectively benefited EF. The results revealed differences in strategy use across the treatment levels but provided no evidence that strategy use mediated the relation between aerobic exercise and improved EF. However, the results did provide valuable information regarding developmental trends in strategic behavior on a standardized measure of EF. Also, strategy use was related to greater accuracy but not to decreased completion time on all EF tasks.