Abstract: Although executive functions continue to develop throughout an individual's lifespan, childhood— characterized by rapid development and heightened plasticity— is widely recognized as the most critical period in this regard. Sports video game training, an innovative approach integrating physical sport with cognitive tasks, has demonstrated promising potential to enhance executive function in children. However, the differential effects of various combinations of sports and video game elements on children's executive functions—as well as the respective roles of cognitive engagement and sport intensity in facilitating these effects in the motor-cognitive domain—warrant further exploration. This study aimed to identify which form of sports video game training is most beneficial for enhancing children's executive functions, through two innovative intervention experiments.
Experiment 1, including 90 children (mean age = 11.34 ± 0.48 years), employed an integrated training mode (sports video game training) and a combined training mode (sports + video game training) to examine their differential effects on children's executive functions through a 6-week intervention (3 sessions per week, 30 minutes per session). Results demonstrated that sports video game training significantly enhanced children's response inhibition and working memory updating abilities, with effects markedly superior to those of sports + video game training and the control group. However, interference inhibition and attention switching yielded no significant improvement across training conditions. A supplementary experiment further revealed that compared with young adults, children derived greater cognitive benefits from sports video game training, likely attributable to their higher neural plasticity during this rapid developmental period of executive functions. This finding provides important evidence for prioritizing the integrated training mode in pediatric populations.
Experiment 2 included 120 children (mean age = 12.44 ± 0.61 years) and adopted a 2 (sport intensity: high vs. low) × 2 (cognitive engagement: high vs. low) experimental design to further elucidate the roles of sport intensity and cognitive engagement as mechanisms underlying the effects of sports video game training on executive function. Results indicated that, compared with sport intensity, cognitive engagement exerted a more significant and enduring facilitative effect on children's response inhibition, with a substantially larger effect size (η²_p = 0.379) than sport intensity (η²_p = 0.140). Moreover, the advantage of high cognitive engagement amplified progressively with extended training duration. Regarding working memory updating, although both sport intensity and cognitive engagement contributed positively, they exhibited no significant interaction effect, suggesting that these two factors may influence executive functions through independent neural pathways—sport intensity via a “physiological arousal-resource allocation” pathway and cognitive engagement through a “task challenge-neural modulation” pathway.
In conclusion, this study revealed the significant effects of sports video game training in enhancing children's executive functions as well as the underlying mechanisms, providing novel empirical support for embodied cognition theory and the cognitive stimulation hypothesis, while also offering scientific evidence for executive function interventions in educational practice. Future research should prioritize the integrated training mode, strengthen cognitive task design, and flexibly adjust sport intensity according to children's age characteristics and individual differences, while also investigating optimal dosage parameters and the long-term sustainability of training effects to maximize intervention outcomes.

Key words: sports video game training, executive function, children, sport intensity, cognitive engagement