The relationship between motor skills and cognitive skills of international preschool children: A systematic review

Abstract

In order to systematically summarize the current situation and the latest progress of the research on the relationship between preschool children^s motor skills and cognitive skills, the research in this field in the past 10 years was summarized and analyzed by the method of systematic review. A total of 1785 articles were retrieved by searching PubMed and Web of science, and excluded articles were included according to strict criteria, resulting in 21 eligible high-quality articles. A total of 14460 participants were included in the study, which included cross-sectional studies and longitudinal follow-up studies from the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Finland and other countries. In the choice of testing tools, motor skills test includes Sleigh of hand, rough motor skills test tools, for cognitive skills, most of the mixed use of a variety of scales to test. Almost all studies have come to the conclusion that motor skills and cognitive skills are related, only a few studies have found a weak relationship between motor skills and executive function and a negative correlation between unstructured physical activity and working memory. For an explanation of the correlation between the two, it is widely believed that motor skill learning stimulates brain regions associated with cognitive skill development, and that motor stimulation in early childhood helps to create neural networks, it also shows that motor skills with cognitive participation have a certain influence on the development of cognitive skills, compared with physical activities without cognitive skills.

Keywords: Preschool children, cognitive skills, motor skills, systematic review

Topic: Youth development through sport