"Our work has important implications for educational and public health policies, as sedentary behaviors and inactivity rise and physical activity opportunities are reduced or eliminated during the school day," Chaddock-Heyman says. "Hopefully these findings will reinforce the importance of aerobic fitness during development and lead to additional physical activity opportunities in and out of the school environment."
The researchers used a type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look at five different white matter tracts in the brains of two dozen 9- and 10-year-olds, half of whom were more physically fit and half were less fit. White matter also works to carry nerve signals between different parts of the brain, and all of the tracts examined have been associated with attention and memory, the study says. Just one-quarter of American Youths currently engage in the recommended amount of daily physical activity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That can have a negative impact on their academics, research has shown. Previous research shown improved fitness can boost students' memory and learning, but this new study is the first to show a connection between physical fitness and brain structure during childhood.
"We know from previous work that higher fit children outperform lower fit children on tasks of attention, memory and school performance," Chaddock-Heyman says. "Thus, it is possible that white matter structure is another pathway by which fitness relates to improved cognition."
The study was published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Moving forward, the researchers plan to conduct a five-year study to determine whether children's white matter structure improves when they start and maintain a new physical fitness routine.
"Be smart, and exercise your heart," Chaddock-Heyman says. "High levels of physical fitness are not only good for one's physical health, but one's cognitive and brain health as well." Children who are physically fit absorb and retain new information more effectively than children who are out of shape, a new study finds, raising timely questions about the wisdom of slashing physical education programs at schools. Parents and exercise scientists (who, not infrequently, are the same people) have known for a long time that physical activity helps young people to settle and pay attention in school or at home, with salutary effects on academic performance. A representative study, presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine, found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who ran around and otherwise exercised vigorously for at least 10 minutes before a math test scored higher than children who had sat quietly before the exam.
More generally, in a large-scale study of almost 12,000 Nebraska schoolchildren published in August in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers compiled each child’s physical fitness, as measured by a timed run, body mass index and academic achievement in English and math, based on the state’s standardized test scores. Better fitness proved to be linked to significantly higher achievement scores, while, interestingly, body size had almost no role. Students who were overweight but relatively fit had higher test scores than lighter, less-fit children.
To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether and in what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. So researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on a treadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the least fit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on some difficult memorization tasks.
Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not only the taking in and storing of new information in the form of memories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling that information later. Information that cannot be recalled has not really been learned