Nowadays, the importance of physical activity (PA) in young children’s physical and mental development is increasingly acknowledged by educators and parents. Accordingly, government policy also points to increasing PA for preschool- and school-aged students. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that preschool-aged children engage in at least 180 min of physical activity per day (60 min of which should be moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity [MVPA]), whereas school-age children are recommended to engage in 60 min of MVPA per day (Onis, 2020). Increased levels of PA, especially MVPA, are associated with improved health, cognitive, and academic outcomes for preschool-age children (Gu, 2015; Zhang et al., 2020). Meta-analytic and narrative literature reviews have documented that MVPA is specifically associated with executive function (EF) in adults, adolescents, and school-age children and preschoolers (Palmer et al., 2013; Egger et al., 2019; Koorts et al., 2019; O’Brien et al., 2021). The benefits of increased MVPA for improved academic outcomes may be due, in part, to the impact of MVPA on improved EF (Erickson et al., 2019). However, studies involving preschool-aged children indicated most preschoolers failed to reach the recommended requirement and preschoolers spend their time mostly in a sedentary state (Lindsay et al., 2017; Stone et al., 2019; Chang and Lei, 2021). Children need help to be more active. Schools, preschools, and child care are critical venues to assist children to meet daily recommendations (Aivazidis et al., 2019; Carson et al., 2020).

Executive function refers to a subset of top-down cognitive control processes for goal-directed behavior (Friedman and Miyake, 2017). Scholars believe that the main structures of EF of preschool children are inhibitory control, working memory, and shifting (McNeill et al., 2018; Jusienė et al., 2020). Inhibitory control is the ability to inhibit dominant responses and to restrain persuasive thoughts and behaviors (Diamond, 2000). Working memory refers to a system which stores and processes information simultaneously for complex cognitive tasks (Morra et al., 2018). Shifting, based on inhibitory control and working memory, is the ability to rapidly change tasks, operations, mental sets, or strategies (Diamond, 2000; Dan et al., 2021).

As an essential factor of learning and development, EF is fundamental to cognitive development (Cook et al., 2019). EF emerges during the early years of life and continues to improve significantly through childhood, and then develops at a slower pace during adolescence (Brocki and Bohlin, 2004). Between the ages of 3–6 remains to be one of the critical times of EF development (Diamond, 2002; Carlson, 2015). Early executive functioning tends to produce a potential and delayed effect on childhood, such as academic performance and school readiness (Röthlisberger et al., 2013; Nelson et al., 2017).

The association between PA and EF is well established (Diamond and Lee, 2011; Chang et al., 2012). Although it is well known that PA facilitates cognitive development, especially EF, the degree to which PA facilitates EF substantially varies in terms of the type and quality of PA (Zach and Shalom, 2016; Shanshika et al., 2021). As for older children, adolescents, and adults, researchers suggested there is a relatively stable and positive relationship between PA and EF (Chang et al., 2012; Dan et al., 2021), while the relationship between PA and EF is inconsistent in young children, and several underlying factor may affect this relationship in preschoolers.

First, the effect of PA on cognition is related to the intensity and duration of PA. Significant dose effects have been found, which suggest longer duration and greater intensity can bring better EF improvement (Aadland et al., 2017; Egger et al., 2019; Hsieh et al., 2020; Welsch et al., 2021). However, the association between PA and EF is inconsistent in preschoolers. On the one hand, some research found that PA significantly correlated with EF development (McNeill et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2020), while some research failed to find a positive association between MVPA and EF skills in early childhood (McNeill et al., 2018; Willoughby et al., 2018; Cook et al., 2019). Even though two studies reported that MVPA was negatively associated with performance on EF tasks (Willoughby et al., 2018; Cook et al., 2019), these results may arise from efforts to increase MVPA in early childhood which may interfere with EF skill development due to competing demands for energy expenditures related to PA and brain development (Voss et al., 2014).

The second factor is cognitive demands which are inherent in many forms of PA and induce cognitive engagement (Best, 2010; Valentin et al., 2018). Accordingly, participating in PA with cognitive demands provides individuals with opportunities of cognitive operation and training. For example, tennis playing may require adaptations for changeable conditions to improve visual-spatial skills (Gökçe and Günes, 2021); football games also stimulate attention abilities (Marianna et al., 2015). Moreover, research also indicated that motor skills contained in PA, especially complex motor skills which include multiple action changes, have positive effects in promoting individuals’ cognitive development (Valentin et al., 2016; Shafer et al., 2019). The mechanism that improves EF by cognition-engaged PA came from its complex interference environment, which places demands of executive processes as a motor action plan that must be created, monitored, and modified in the presence of continually changing tasks (Farrow and Buszard, 2017).

Another important factor lies in the different motor skill engagement in different PA, especially for young children. Motor skills, which have been defined as the ability to produce a smooth, efficient action in order to finish a particular task, have been shown to contribute to both physical health and cognitive development (Gashaj et al., 2019). Moreover, different categories of motor skills are distinguished according to reviews so far, including fine and gross motor skills, locomotor and object control skills, and body coordination (Nan et al., 2017). According to a recent research, improvements in motor competence skills are associated with improvements in EF in early childhood (Oberer et al., 2018; Willoughby et al., 2021). Tomporowski and Pesce (2019) pointed that when motor skills required for PA are complex, the individual has to process a large amount of information while controlling body movements, and therefore, EF is enhanced along with the acquisition of motor skills.

Lastly, the intervention program form should not be neglected. Interventions of group-play games seem to have better effects compared with traditional physical training. First, group play maximizes the effect of PA on EF, as most children’s PA, processed in group activities, requires complex cognition in order to cooperate with others and switching strategies to adapt to ever-changing task demands (Davis et al., 2007). Moreover, group-play intervention can also motivate children’s social involvement, and provide social learning opportunities through interaction (Eidsvg and Rosell, 2021). Cooperative and competitive exercise requires individuals to engage in multiple functions (sustained attention, working memory, regular behavior, emotional arousal such as self-esteem, stress, loneliness, etc.); the social interaction in such group play motivates individuals to do possible behaviors in response to peer reactions, and then the increased cognitive effort in this process can have beneficial effects on cognitive performance (Best, 2011; Myhre et al., 2017).

Accordingly, research (Best, 2010; Myhre et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2020; Willoughby et al., 2021) suggested that when designing and implementing PA intervention for preschoolers, a series of factors, for example, duration, intensity, the cognition demand, and the form of PA intervention, should be taken into consideration to improve the whole effect of the PA intervention.

Therefore, in this research, a comprehensive intervention was designed and implemented for young children. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of this curriculum-prescribed MVPA intervention on EF and motor skills in 4- to 5-year-old children for 8 weeks. The group-play trial was conducted in a real-world setting where the class teachers delivered the intervention which combined MVPA with cognitive engagement in preschool children. The present research developed a group-play MVPA intervention to promote motor skills and cognition of preschoolers. In the process of intervention, the intensity and types of physical activity were controlled. In addition, we examined whether EF and motor skills between intervention and control groups differed. We hypothesized that the 8-week cognitively engaging MVPA enriching physical education would result in improvement of motor skills and core components of EF. Specifically, there are two hypotheses in this research:

Besides the descriptive statistics (see Table 1), two sets of analyses were conducted to examine the group-play MVPA intervention’s effect on the children’s motor skills and EF, respectively.

The present research examined the effect of a group-play MVPA intervention program on the development of motor skills and EF in 4- to 5-year-old preschoolers. Overall, 62 preschoolers of 4–5 years old participated in the pilot cluster randomized controlled trial to examine the effectiveness of this program, and the result indicated that both the preschoolers’ motor skills and EF improved significantly.

To begin with, this group-play MVPA intervention improved the preschoolers’ motor skills significantly, and this result was in accordance with previous research where PA improved individuals’ motor skills and capability (Zeng et al., 2017; Sansi et al., 2021), including preschoolers, because PA provided individuals with the opportunity to exercise their motor skills (Figueroa and An, 2017). Another study indicated that PA with the special purpose of practicing certain movements brought significantly more benefits to young children’s motor skill development (Coutinho et al., 2016). And vice versa, the improvement of motor skills also increased children’s tendency to participate in PA (Dapp et al., 2021). Recent research further proved that compared with low intensity PA, MVPA had an additional positive effect on preschoolers’ motor skills (Nilsen et al., 2020).

Moreover, the relationship between PA and cognition development in young children has been well examined. However, how to develop an appropriate intervention program is still a challenge to both researchers and practitioners all over the world. In this research, we tried to integrate three characteristics of PA, which have been found to play a critical role in young children’s cognition development, into a preschool-based PA intervention. These characteristics were the intensity and duration of PA (Egger et al., 2019), cognitive load (Aadland et al., 2017; Willoughby et al., 2021), and the form of the games (Myhre et al., 2017; Eidsvg and Rosell, 2021); and by integrating these factors, we designed an 8-week group-play MVPA intervention for cognition in children. Our hypothesis that the program is effective in promoting preschoolers’ EF has been supported. How this intervention facilitated the development of motor skills and EF in preschoolers is discussed in the following.

First, the effectiveness of the intervention program may partly stem from the moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity. It is well established that MVPA has positive effects on cognitive development in mostly older children (Egger et al., 2019), adolescents (Koorts et al., 2019), and adults (O’Brien et al., 2021). However, some research studies also found converse results where MVPA decreased the preschoolers’ performance on EF tasks (McNeill et al., 2018; Willoughby et al., 2018; Cook et al., 2019); the reason may be that intense PA consumes cognitive processing resources, which are especially limited in young children; therefore, MVPA will decrease children’s cognitive performance (Voss et al., 2014). The present intervention program confirmed that the MVPA training contributed to the increase of EF, and it may result from two things. The first reason may be that, instead of continuously, the preschoolers in this program participated in MVPA intermittently and consumed relatively fewer cognitive resources. The second reason may be that, as previous research indicated that positive emotion had a positive effect on individuals’ EF (Wang et al., 2017), the familiar, natural, and cheerful context in the present program may make children feel relaxed and happy, and consequently contribute to the preschoolers’ improved performance of EF tasks.

Second, another explanation to the effectiveness may be that the present intervention improved EF of preschoolers with the involvement of cognitive operation. Plenty of research studies have proved that the cognitive load in PA is positively related to executive development (Miller and Best, 2010; Valentin et al., 2018). In this intervention program, we increased the cognitive load in the intervention tasks, and almost all tasks required children to use components of EF. For example, in the “Flip the Cards” game, participants had to use visuo-spatial working memory to remember the card position; and during the process, the participants practiced and improved their visuo-spatial working memory. Another case is “Do the Opposite,” in order to help preschoolers to develop inhibitory control, the participants were required to overcome their dominant reactions and to do the opposite actions to the teachers’ orders. Moreover, reams of research indicated that complicated motor movement also added to the cognitive load of PA (Aadland et al., 2017; Tomporowski and Pesce, 2019; Willoughby et al., 2021). In our intervention program, the children had to complete a lot of complicated gross (combination of walk, run, jump, throw, and kick) and fine movements (pinch, hold, point with one’s fingers); these movements may also facilitate children’s cognitive engagement in the intervention program and consequently improve their cognitive development.

Third, this intervention program was implemented through group-play games, which might also contribute to EF development in the preschoolers. In group play, children had to cooperate and compete with their peers, which may produce an exceeding effect of improving EF beyond the single exercise. The function of group play may be that the social interaction required the preschooler to respond to their peers’ behaviors on time and predict their following actions, which will demand more cognitive efforts (Best, 2011; Myhre et al., 2017). In each of the four games, the children had to interact with peers closely; for example, in the ‘Piggy Builds House’ game, the children needed to determine how to choose appropriate blocks according to their peers’ building situation.

Due to the constraints of the study setting, the measurement tools chosen for the study for EF and motor skills have yet to be refined. Accordingly (Miyake and Friedman, 2012), the task impurity of the instrument is a problem, any score derived from an EF task necessarily includes systematic variance attributable to non-EF processes (e.g., articulation speed). It can be alleviated by using multiple measures of each EF component under investigation (Snyder et al., 2015).

This study did not use various tasks to investigate different EF components. Panesi et al. (2022) argued that tests containing an updating task for preschoolers should also be included due to the distinction between working memory capacity and working memory updating. Moreover, a test for inhibitory control requires a novel response in the face of a conflicting prepotent response (conflict scale) (e.g., children have to overcome dominant responses in the SSS task to select the opposite image) and the delay of a prepotent response (delay scale) (e.g., the gift delayed task, Kochanska et al., 2000; Carlson and Moses, 2010). To greatly avoid the impact of task impurity on the results, the study should also make adjustments in the choice of EF.

Instead of the test of gross motor development (TGMD) that has been widely used as a measure of young children’s motor skills (Burns et al., 2016), we used other motor tests, including 10-m running, standing broad jump, throwing, body flexion, balance beam, and skip jump, to measure motor skills. The six tests were originally chosen to facilitate comparison with similar studies in China, but we are fully aware of their limitations and that more scientific and specialized testing tools should be used.

As for subjects, aiming to ensure the scientific validity of the data, the study should test cognition, neurodevelopmental disorders, and sensory functions to control for effects of extraneous variables on testing. Moreover, this study should fully consider the issue of individual differences in motor skills and cognition within the same group, and divide the preschoolers, according to the results of motor skills and EF, into different groups before comparing intervention and control groups. Besides, considering the age and gender differences in EF and motor skills of preschool children is also of importance (Carlson and Moses, 2010; Jacobsen et al., 2017); due to practical issues, age of children and the number of boys in the intervention and control groups differed, the age and number of boys and girls in the subjects of the two groups should be balanced.

On the other side, this study did not include two control groups. If the situation was ideal, two control groups should be selected. On the one hand, it could better eliminate the impact of different teaching styles of teachers. On the other hand, it may include a control group of the lowest level of cognitive engagement of MVPA or high-level cognitive PA with moderate intensity, so as to compare the different effects on EF between various levels of cognitively engaged MVPA or between the same cognitive demand with different intensities of PA.

In addition, feelings of participants from the intervention group and control group should also be tested immediately after each session, so as to better verify the relationship among intervention, EF, and children’s mood. It is a good way to study the effect of emotion which can serve as an intermediate variable on motor skills and EF. Finally, the study should also exclude the influence of family conditions, including the influence of family income, parent education level, second-child family, and so on. Moreover, it is worthwhile to test the consistency and temporary effects of being cognitively engaged in MVPA on cognition. In the present study, the frequency and time points of EF tests were not covered over the whole intervention period, such as testing EF after each session and a delay of 10–20 min or testing in the day without a session, or even 5 days after the whole intervention was completed.

Regarding the positive effects on preschooler’s EF and motor skills, one might ask how significant this finding is for the educational setting in general and what possible consequences it may have for PA at preschool. The intervention of this study can be used in preschool physical education to improve motor skills and cognitive functions of young children. This study provides a new perspective for preschool teachers to design and organize outdoor sports activities, and help teachers focus more on the cognitive benefits of cognitively challenging PA for preschoolers. In addition to refining teachers’ theoretical conceptions, the study also provides implications for teachers when making plans on cognitive engagement PA including increasing the frequency of movement changes and possibility of cooperative and competitive group play in PA and adding tasks related to EF in sports activities to improve the promoting effect of physical activities on cognition. Further research should focus on studying the relationships between different intensities of PA with low-high cognitively engaged group play interventions, as well as their internal mechanisms.

The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee in Capital Normal University. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

JB was involved in experimental method design, actual investigation and research, experimental data analysis, visualization of experimental results, and writing with the first draft of the manuscript. HH was mainly involved in research concept generation, research funding acquisition, research resource collection, experimental design validation and verification, research project supervision and guidance, and manuscript review and revision. HO was mainly responsible for the polishing and expression of words and manuscript review and revision. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

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.

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