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Received Jan 6, 2018; Revised Mar 18, 2018; Accepted Apr 5, 2018
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
It was widely accepted that physical activity (PA) plays a key role in the growth and development of children. The benefits of PA for preschool children may include but are not limited to controlling weight status and blood pressure, developing motor skills, and improving psychological wellbeing [1–4]. Over the past two decades, inspired by the findings in neuroscience and embodied cognitive science, many studies have been conducted to investigate the effects of PA programs on the cognitive functions in children [5–7]. Most of these studies have favored the positive correlations among PA and cognitive functions.
Executive function (EF) refers to the advanced cognitive ability of coordinating and controlling a set of cognitive processes for the attainment of a specific goal [8]. The EF of preschool children, which may affect the subsequent development of their academic achievement [9, 10] and social interaction [11, 12], is one of the important components in individual development. Recent studies indicated that PA intervention may exert beneficial effects on children’s EF. Experimental research suggested that both acute and chronic aerobic exercises could effectively improve children’s EF [13]. However, the findings have yet to be generalized to school or other naturalistic environments as some studies were conducted in laboratory setting [5]. Furthermore, studies also suggested that not all forms of physical activity equally promote EF [13]. It was reported that children in a 4-week foreign language vocabulary program with integrated PA achieved better learning outcomes than children in conventional condition [14]. However, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) indicated that the attention and working memory of children were not significantly improved following a one school year intervention [15]. Therefore, additional studies are needed to strengthen the evidence base for intervention programs of PA toward the development of EF and related outcomes.
Trampoline, a type of gymnastics and also known as “air ballet,” is an athletic sport very popular in Chinese preschool children, which uses acrobatic skills to rebound from trampoline. During mini-trampoline PA, children need to continuously respond to...