Acute effects of intense interval versus aerobic exercise on children's behavioral and neuroelectric measures of inhibitory control

Objectives: Determine the acute effect of high-intensity interval training as an alternative of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise on behavioral and neuroelectric measures of inhibitory control in preadolescent children. Design: A randomized controlled trial. Methods: Seventy-seven children (8–10 years) were randomly assigned to three groups to complete a modified flanker task to measure behavioral and neuroelectric (N2/P3 of event-related potential and frontal theta oscillations) outcomes of inhibitory control before and after a 20-min session of high-intensity interval training (N = 27), moderate-intensity aerobic exercise (N = 25), and sedentary reading activity (N = 25). Results: The accuracy of the inhibitory control performance improved over time across three groups but response time was selectively improved only for the high-intensity interval training group. Analysis on N2 showed a time-related decrease in N2 latency selectively for the high-intensity interval training but not the other groups. Analysis on P3 showed a time-related decrease in P3 amplitude for the sedentary and high-intensity interval training groups while the moderate-intensity aerobic exercise group exhibited maintained P3 amplitude from the pretest to the posttest and a larger P3 amplitude compared with the high-intensity interval training group at the posttest. While there was evidence of conflict-induced modulation of frontal theta oscillations, such an effect was unaffected by exercise interventions. Conclusions: A single bout of high-intensity interval training has facilitating effects on the processing speed involving inhibitory control in preadolescent children but not neuroelectric index of attention allocation that only benefited from moderate-intensity aerobic exercise.