CHICAGO, Feb. 18 (Xinhua) -- A study posted on the website of the University of Illinois (UI) on Thursday finds that 4-6-year-old children who walk farther than their peers during a timed test also do better on cognitive tests and other measures of brain function.

To better understand the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and brain health in 59 preschool-aged children, the researchers subjected them to several tests. The children walked as far as they could in six minutes, a test that allowed researchers to estimate their cardiorespiratory fitness. An early cognitive and academic development test gave the team a measure of each child's intellectual abilities, and a computerized "flanker" task measured how well they were able to focus on the important part of an image while ignoring distracting information. Participants also took part in a computerized task that required them to alter their responses depending on whether flowers or hearts appeared on the screen -- a measure of mental flexibility.

A subset of 33 children also engaged in an auditory task that required them to respond to certain sounds and not others while wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap.

Statistical analyses revealed a relationship between the children's physical fitness and their cognitive abilities and brain function, the researchers said.

"Preschool children with higher estimated cardiorespiratory fitness had higher scores on academic ability tasks related to general intellectual abilities as well as their use of expressive language," said doctoral student Shelby Keye, who led the new research. "They had better performance on computerized tasks requiring attention and multitasking skills, and they showed the potential for faster processing speeds and greater resource allocation in the brain when completing these computerized tasks."

The study does not prove that cardiorespiratory fitness enhances cognitive abilities in young children but adds to a growing body of evidence that the two are closely linked -- even in children as young as four years old, the researchers said.

The study has been published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. Enditem

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