The Daily Mile™: Acute effects on children’s cognitive function and factors affecting their enjoyment

The Daily Mile™ is a widely implemented school-based physical activity initiative. However, only two studies have explored the acute effects of participation in The Daily Mile on children’s cognitive functioning, reporting conflicting findings. Moreover, enjoyment of exercise is a determining factor in children’s motivation for, and adherence to, initiatives. However, factors affecting children’s enjoyment of The Daily Mile are unknown. Therefore, this study examined the acute effects of The Daily Mile on cognition and explored children’s enjoyment of participation in the initiative. Following familiarisation, 104 children (10.4 ± 0.7 years) completed a Daily Mile and resting control trial in a randomised, counterbalanced order. Prior to, immediately following and 45 min following The Daily Mile and resting, children completed the Stroop test (inhibitory control), Sternberg paradigm (visual working memory) and Flanker task (inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility). Additionally, 87 children took part in focus groups to explore factors affecting enjoyment. Cognitive data were analysed using two-way (trial*time) and three-way (trial*time*sex; trial*time*fitness) repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). Focus group data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. There were no statistically significant effects of The Daily Mile on cognition, compared to rest (all p > 0.05). However, accuracy on the one-item level of Sternberg paradigm (p = 0.073, η_p² = 0.028) and complex level of the Stroop test (p = 0.057; η_p² = 0.031) tended to improve immediately following The Daily Mile, compared to resting; though this did not reach statistical significance. Children enjoyed participating in The Daily Mile, particularly due to its outdoor location, social context, and self-paced nature. However, some children found The Daily Mile boring due to its repetitive nature. Findings suggest that The Daily Mile does not significantly influence children’s immediate or delayed (45 min) cognition. However, there was a tendency for improved accuracy in visual working memory and inhibitory control immediately following The Daily Mile. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that The Daily Mile promotes enjoyment, particularly through social relatedness and autonomy. However, future research could consider whether adding variety into the initiative may help to sustain engagement in the children experiencing boredom.     

Children’s scale errors and object processing: Early evidence for cross-cultural differences

Scale errors are observed when young children make mistakes by attempting to put their bodies into miniature versions of everyday objects. Such errors have been argued to arise from children’s insufficient integration of size into their object representations. The current study investigated whether Japanese and UK children’s (18–24 months old, N = 80) visual exploration in a categorization task related to their scale error production. UK children who showed greater local processing made more scale errors, whereas Japanese children, who overall showed greater global processing, showed no such relationship. These results raise the possibility that children’s suppression of scale errors emerges not from attention to size per se, but from a critical integration of global (i.e., size) and local (i.e., object features) information during object processing, and provide evidence that this mechanism differs cross-culturally.