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Aim: To investigate whether increased physical exercise during the school day influenced subsequent cognitive performance in the classroom. Method: A randomized, crossover-design trial (two weeks in duration) was conducted in six mainstream primary schools (1224 children aged 8-11y). No data on sex was available. Children received a teacher-directed, classroom-based programme of physical exercise, delivered approximately 30 minutes after lunch for 15 minutes during one week and no exercise programme during the other (order counterbalanced across participants). At the end of each school day, they completed one of five psychometric tests (paced serial addition, size ordering, listening span, digit-span backwards, and digit-symbol encoding), so that each test was delivered once after exercise and once after no exercise. Results: General linear modelling analysis demonstrated a significant interaction between intervention and counterbalance group (p less than 0.001), showing that exercise benefited cognitive performance. Post-hoc analysis revealed that benefits occurred in participants who received the exercise intervention in the second but not the first week of the experiment and were also moderated by type of test and age group. Interpretation: Physical exercise benefits cognitive performance within the classroom. The degree of benefit depends on the context of testing and participants' characteristics. This has implications for the role that is attributed to physical exercise within the school curriculum. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Aims: We aimed to assess the psychometric properties of a Japanese version of the Actions and Feelings Questionnaire (J-AFQ), an 18-item self-report measure of non-verbal emotional communication, as well as to examine its transcultural properties. Methods: The J-AFQ was administered to 500 Japanese adults (age 20–49, 250 male), alongside the Japanese Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ-J) and Empathy Quotient (EQ-J). These were compared to a group of 597 British and Irish participants (age 16–18, 148 male). J-AFQ was assessed in terms of validity by confirmatory factor analysis and convergence with BAPQ-J and EQ-J using Pearson correlation. Internal consistency and differential item functioning (DIF) were assessed and compared between Japanese and UK/Irish participants. Results: Reversed worded items (RWIs) showed poor item-total correlations but excluding these left a 13-item version of the J-AFQ with good internal consistency and content validity. Consistent with the English version, J-AFQ scores correlated with EQ and lower BAPQ scores. However, comparing across cultures, J-AFQ scores were significantly lower in the Japanese sample, and there was evidence of important DIF by country in over half of the J-AFQ items Conclusion: Cultural differences in attitudes to self-report, as well as increased acquiescence to RWI's also seen in previous studies, limit the value of the 18-item instrument in Japanese culture. However, the 13-item J-AFQ is a valid and reliable measure of motor empathy, which, alongside the English version, offers promise for research in motor cognition and non-verbal emotional communication across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention underpins many activities integral to a child’s development. However, methodological limitations currently make large-scale assessment of children’s attentional skill impractical, costly and lacking in ecological validity. Consequently we developed a measure of ‘Visual Motor Attention’ (VMA)—a construct defined as the ability to sustain and adapt visuomotor behaviour in response to task-relevant visual information. In a series of experiments, we evaluated the capability of our method to measure attentional processes and their contributions in guiding visuomotor behaviour. Experiment 1 established the method’s core features (ability to track stimuli moving on a tablet-computer screen with a hand-held stylus) and demonstrated its sensitivity to principled manipulations in adults’ attentional load. Experiment 2 standardised a format suitable for use with children and showed construct validity by capturing developmental changes in executive attention processes. Experiment 3 tested the hypothesis that children with and without coordination difficulties would show qualitatively different response patterns, finding an interaction between the cognitive and motor factors underpinning responses. Experiment 4 identified associations between VMA performance and existing standardised attention assessments and thereby confirmed convergent validity. These results establish a novel approach to measuring childhood attention that can produce meaningful functional assessments that capture how attention operates in an ecologically valid context (i.e. attention's specific contribution to visuomanual action). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social communication relies on intentional control of emotional expression. Its variability across cultures suggests important roles for imitation in developing control over enactment of subtly different facial expressions and therefore skills in emotional communication. Both empathy and the imitation of an emotionally communicative expression may rely on a capacity to share both the experience of an emotion and the intention or motor plan associated with its expression. Therefore, we predicted that facial imitation ability would correlate with empathic traits. We built arrays of visual stimuli by systematically blending three basic emotional expressions in controlled proportions. Raters then assessed accuracy of imitation by reconstructing the same arrays using photographs of participants’ attempts at imitations of the stimuli. Accuracy was measured as the mean proximity of the participant photographs to the target stimuli in the array. Levels of performance were high, and rating was highly reliable. More empathic participants, as measured by the empathy quotient (EQ), were better facial imitators and, in particular, performed better on the more complex, blended stimuli. This preliminary study offers a simple method for the measurement of facial imitation accuracy and supports the hypothesis that empathic functioning may utilise motor control mechanisms which are also used for emotional expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim To investigate whether increased physical exercise during the school day influenced subsequent cognitive performance in the classroom. Method A randomized, crossover-design trial (two weeks in duration) was conducted in six mainstream primary schools (1224 children aged 8–11y). No data on sex was available. Children received a teacher-directed, classroom-based programme of physical exercise, delivered approximately 30 minutes after lunch for 15 minutes during one week and no exercise programme during the other (order counterbalanced across participants). At the end of each school day, they completed one of five psychometric tests (paced serial addition, size ordering, listening span, digit-span backwards, and digit-symbol encoding), so that each test was delivered once after exercise and once after no exercise. Results General linear modelling analysis demonstrated a significant interaction between intervention and counterbalance group ( p<0.001), showing that exercise benefitted cognitive performance. Post-hoc analysis revealed that benefits occurred in participants who received the exercise intervention in the second but not the first week of the experiment and were also moderated by type of test and age group. Interpretation Physical exercise benefits cognitive performance within the classroom. The degree of benefit depends on the context of testing and participants’ characteristics. This has implications for the role that is attributed to physical exercise within the school curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imitative deficits have been associated with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) for many years, most recently through more robust methodologies. A fresh, systematic review of the significance, characteristics, and underlying mechanism of the association is therefore warranted. From 121 candidates, we focused on 21 well-controlled studies involving 281 cases of ASD. Overall, children with ASD performed worse on imitative tasks (Combined Logit p value < .00005). The emerging picture is of delayed development in imitation, implicating a deficit in mapping neural codings for actions between sensory and motor modalities, rather than in motivation or executive function. We hypothesise that ASD is characterised by abnormal development of these mappings, such that they are biased towards object-oriented tasks at the expense of those required for action imitation per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]