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. 2021 Oct 27:12:743504.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.743504. eCollection 2021.

Body Mobility and Attention Networks in 6- to 7-Year-Old Children

Joëlle Rosenbaum  1 , Jean-Michel Hascoët  1   2 , Isabelle Hamon  1   2 , Arthur Petel  1 , Sébastien Caudron  3 , Hadrien Ceyte  1
Affiliations

Body Mobility and Attention Networks in 6- to 7-Year-Old Children

Joëlle Rosenbaum et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Learning in 6- to 7-year-old children is strongly influenced by three functions of attention: alertness, orienting, and executive control. These functions share a close relationship with body mobility, such as the posture adopted or a request to stay still during tasks. The aim of this study (ClinicalTrials.gov) was to analyze the influence of body posture (standing versus sitting) and the influence of these imposed postures compared to a free body mobility on attention functions in 6- to 7-year-old children. Twenty-one children (11 girls) with a mean age of 6.7±0.6years performed the Attention Network Test for Children in three-body mobility conditions: sitting still, standing still, and free to move. Three attentional scores were calculated which would separately reflect performance of alertness, orienting, and executive control. Overall, no difference in alertness performance was found between the three bodily mobility conditions. In addition, our results suggest a general poor orienting performance in children, whatever the body mobility condition, which might be related to their young age. Finally, children improved their executive control performance when they stood still, probably due to an improvement in arousal and mental state.

Keywords: alertness; attention networks; body mobility; executive control; orienting; posture; school-aged children.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Proportion of children not moving (0), moving between 0 and 1, 1 and 5, 5 and 10 and more than 10s per minute for each type of movement in each body mobility condition.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Alerting score, orienting score, and conflict score in each body mobility condition. Error bars represent the mean absolute difference. *p<0.05.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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