Neurocognitive processes mediate the relation between children's motor skills, cardiorespiratory fitness and response inhibition: Evidence from source imaging

Accumulating evidence suggests an association between outcomes of sports participation, such as motor skills and cardiorespiratory fitness, and aspects of inhibitory control in children. However, it remains unclear if motor skills and cardiorespiratory fitness are related to different source activity patterns and if neurophysiological indices of response inhibition mediate the relation of these constructs with behavioral performance. We examined the relative contributions of motor skills and cardiorespiratory fitness to response inhibition and a potential mediation by the neurocognitive processes indexed by the N200 and P300 components of event-related potentials. About 92 children aged 9-13 years completed the Movement ABC-2, the PWC170 and a Go/NoGo task. We employed electroencephalography (EEG) to record the N200 and P300 components elicited by the task, which are considered to reflect conflict monitoring and the allocation of attentional resources toward task-relevant stimuli, respectively. Path-anlayses revealed a moderate association between motor skills and behavioral performance on the Go/NoGo task. This association was fully mediated by the P300 amplitude in the NoGo condition. In contrast, cardiorespiratory fitness was not related to behavioral performance, but accounted for variance in N200. Source analyses supported an association between cardiorespiratory fitness and N200 source activity in prefrontal and primary motor cortex, whereas motor skills were related to P300 source activity in the posterior cingulate cortex. Our findings provide novel insights into the neural mechanisms underlying the relation between motor skills and response inhibition. Moreover, we found that the neural generators of the P300 and N200 varied as a function of children's cardiorespiratory fitness and motor skills.