Browsing by Author "Laine, Julia"

It is commonly known that physical activity and exercise have a positive effect on physical and psychological health. Previous studies with adults and elderly show that exercise can maintain or even improve cognitive capacity. Due to these results researchers have studied the effects of exercise and physical activity on children’s cognitive ability. Epidemically gro-wing concern with children and adolescent obesity has also had an impact on this field of re-search. Long term effects of exercise on children’s cognitive capacity have been studied with diffe-rent exercise interventions, which are typically organized at schools. Although, exercise in-terventions seem to have some effect it is still unknown what kind of exercise has the grea-test impact. In this thesis, I will study the effect of different kinds of physical activities on children's cognitive skills. This thesis was carried out as a literature review without empirical sample. Review systematically sums up the results from empirical intervention research do-ne. Due to exercise intervention research, getting more exercise during school days seems to have a positive effect on children’s cognitive skills or at least it doesn’t have a negative one. Research is focused on rather simple aerobic exercise interventions. Although, due to some studies covered in these thesis, more diverse aerobic exercises seem to have a greater ef-fect compared to simple ones. There is also some evidence that other than aerobic exercise seem to have an impact on children’s cognitive skills. It is still quite hard to compare the ef-fectiveness of different exercise intervention types due to lack of comprehensive research.