The participation in sports and sustained selective attention in children.

Abstract

Sustained selective attention is in earlier studies considered to be an essential precursor for a child’s optimal development and learning. The question arising is whether this precursor for the level of school abilities can be influenced by any means to increase this child’s optimal development and learning. The main goal is to examine if the increase in sport participation has a positive influence on the level of sustained selective attention in children. Three subgoals are investigated. First, do children show a significantly better performance on accuracy and reaction time during a sustained selective attention task. Second, does sport participation have a positive influence on all remaining outcome measures of the task. Last, do children who participate more hours in sport per week will show a less excessive decrease of the level of attention during the completion of the task. Method. Hundred-fourty-seven physical and mental healthy children (65 boys, 82 girls; age range 6–17) are included in this study, and are asked to conduct a sustained selective attention task (Bourdon-Vos). Their parents are asked to fill in a questionnaire about the amount of hours per week they participate in sports. Results. The results indicate no statistically significant relations for any of the three hypothesis and showed that sport participation therefore has no influence on sustained selective attention in children. For future studies a suggestion is to look deeper and more critical into the sensitivity of both variables, sport participation and sustained selective attention.