A post COVID Lockdown pilot study on the effect of PA intensity on cognitive function in male children aged 6-8 years old.

In a sedentary world (WHO, 2020), physical activity seems an important tool that helps the development of cognitive functions (Tomporoski et al. 2011). However, the majority of the studies investigated the effect through cross sectional studies while only few ones are interventional. In this interventional experiment we focused our attention on how the physical activity modulated a pletory of cognitive functions. Specifically, during three weeks of a summer camp, 13 children performed physical activities at various intensities. In the first week, participants performed activities without any particular suggestions, in the second and third week children performed physical activity at high and low intensity, respectively. Children performed at the first (Baseline) and the last day of the summer camp a series of cognitive function tests in order to understand whether the level of physical activity employed in the Summer Camp week increased the cognitive functions tested. In particular they performed an Attention task (Posner Cueing task, Chun, 2000) and both Working Memory Forward (WMF) and Backwards (WMB) tasks. Results highlighted an increment of the cognitive functions tested: reaction times (RT) of the Attention task were significantly faster in high intensity week compared to the baseline while in the other two experimental weeks this improvement was not occured; similar results in both Working Memory Forward and Backward were found.