This meta-analysis of evidence from acute and chronic research aims to evaluate the extent to which differences in the cognitive demands of physical activity interventions, per se or jointly with their metabolic demands, may explain differences in the observed effects on children's core executive functions. In total, 41 studies involving 7316 participants were meta-analysed to evaluate the effects of cognitively engaging physical activity with respect to different comparator types (non-physically active control, aerobic exercise, or physical education), also considering differences in effect size computation (i.e., pre-post and post-test only). Larger effects, though within the small-size range, emerged in favour of cognitively challenging physical activity from the analysis of pre-post change scores. This favourable effect emerged for acute physical activity, compared to resting, on working memory accuracy only; instead for chronic physical activity, it emerged across core executive function outcomes. Thus, there are small effects that have a different level of domain generality/specificity in chronic and acute physical activity studies. These results call for more research that uses appropriate comparator groups and analyses pre-post change scores along with group differences at post-test to unequivocally state the causal role of cognitive challenge in physical activity to affect children's executive functions. The results also allow to advocate, even though cautiously because of the small effect sizes, implementing aerobic activities with high levels of cognitive engagement in physical education classes for their chronic effects and cognitively challenging active breaks along the school day for their acute effects.
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