A new pilot study suggests that movement -based movement activities and the whole body can help children with autism spectrum disorders improve their self -control and reduce certain negative behaviors. The results, published in the journal Handicap and rehabilitationShow that an intervention focused on movement has led to faster responses on an inhibitory control test and less sensory and disruptive behaviors, while a more traditional sedentary game program has not had such effects.
Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how a person communicates, interacts socially and deals with the world. Autistic children often experience concomitant challenges beyond fundamental symptoms, including difficulties in regulating their emotions and behaviors, unusual sensory responses and executive operating problems. Executive functions are mental skills that allow people to plan, focus attention and control pulses. An important aspect of executive operation is inhibitory control – the ability to stop acting impulsively or ignore distracting information.
In autistic children, altered inhibitory control has been linked to a range of behavioral difficulties, including repetitive actions, transitional difficulties between tasks and aggression or self -regulating problems. However, traditional interventions are often focused on sedentary activities based on the desktop and may not fully meet these overlapping challenges. The research team behind this study wanted to test whether a more dynamic and physically active intervention could produce advantages in the cognitive and behavioral fields.
“Standard autistic interventions do not always incorporate raw motor activities during therapy and mainly focus on sedentary game to improve speech and fine motor skills,” said the study author Anjana BhatProfessor at the University of Delaware. “Consequently, as a pediatric physiotherapist, my research focuses on understanding the way in which the whole body movements by the creative movement or the general exercise facilitate motor, social and cognitive skills in autistic children.”
To explore this, the researchers recruited 40 children diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder. The children were aged 5 to 14, with an average age of around 8.5. Participants were paired by pairs according to their age and verbal capacities, then randomly assigned to one of the two groups: a movement group or a sedentary game group.
The children of the movement group participated in activities based on the whole body designed to be engaging and physically active. These include yoga, obstacle courses, dance and games that involved launching, catching or navigating space. Meanwhile, the children of the group of sedentary games engaged in activities such as arts and crafts, construction with blocks or reading – activities that required fine motor skills but which did not involve a great physical movement. The two groups received 16 sessions over eight weeks, delivered in person or via remote charts, depending on family preferences and constraints related to the pandemic.
Before and after the intervention, all the participants finished a computerized version of the Flanker task, a test commonly used to measure the inhibitory control. In this task, the children received rows of cartoon fish and asked to quickly identify the direction that the average fish pointed, even when the surrounding fish pointed in the opposite direction. The researchers measured at the same time how quickly and at what precision have the children responded.
In addition, the team recorded early and late training sessions and coded the frequency to which children have displayed sensory research behaviors (such as sniffing objects or covering their ears), repetitive behavior (such as handless or swinging), and negative behavior (such as aggression, non-compliance or tires).
At the start of the study, the researchers found a moderate link between children’s performance on the Flanker task and their behavior during the sessions. More specifically, children who took more time to respond during the task tended to show more negative behavior during the game. This suggests that inhibitory control difficulties can be associated with real -world behavioral problems in autistic children.
After the intervention, the children of the movement group showed significant improvements in their performance on the Flanker task. Their reaction time has become significantly faster, indicating better inhibitory control, even if their precision was already high and remained stable. On the other hand, the children of the sedentary game group have shown no change in reaction times or precision after the intervention.
Behavioral observations have also revealed significant differences between the two groups. The children of the movement group showed a significant drop in negative behavior from start to finish at the training period. They also showed a tendency to less sensory research behavior. However, there was no change in the frequency of repetitive behavior, perhaps because these behaviors were more difficult to distinguish typical movement models in an active game framework and filled with music. In the sedentary game group, no change was observed in any of the behavior categories.
These results suggest that physically engaging activities can support cognitive and emotional development in autistic children. Improvements in inhibitory control were not only measurable on a standardized task, but also seemed to be translated as less disruptive behavior during the sessions. This supports the idea that executive functioning and behavioral regulation are interconnected and that interventions targeting one can influence the other.
“Parents of children / young autistic people should offer their child opportunities for a regular creative movement (for example, dance / music and movement, martial arts, yoga) or general exercise (for example, walking, jogging, label, outdoor game or sport) about 1 to 1.5 hours,” said Bhat to Psychost. “Such regular physical activity has the potential to improve their child’s attention, executive functioning, socialization and would give them a feeling of belonging / success, when made solo at home or in a small group format in the community.”
Researchers speculate that physical activity can improve the functioning of managers by increasing blood flow and brain chemicals associated with attention and excitation. The movement based on movement can also offer emotional and sensory advantages by helping children to settle thanks to rhythmic movement and creative expression. While this study focused on the movement of the whole body in a structured but playful format, the team notes that these activities could be easily adapted for backgrounds at home and at school.
However, there are limits to the study that should be taken into account. The size of the sample was relatively low, and although it reflects the higher prevalence of autism in boys, it only included a few girls. It is difficult to know if the same advantages would be observed in autistic girls or in children with different levels of support needs.
“This is a pilot study which requires additional validation thanks to large samples in the future,” noted Bhat.
In the future, researchers plan to extend their work with a larger community test. They aim to study how the game based on movement can be integrated into daily routines to support the engine, social and emotional development of autistic children. They also hope to explore if such interventions offer long -term advantages for mental and physical health.
“By receiving funding, we would like to conduct a large -scale randomized controlled trial to assess the effects of community movement interventions and the whole body offered to autistic children,” said Bhat. “The creative movement capitalizes on the predilection of autistic children for creativity and makes movement fun. Children’s commitment to fun and moderate physical activity will improve their global, social and cognitive development as well as long -term mental and physical form. ”
The study, “Effects of movement and sedentary playing interventions on executive functioning and their relationships with sensory, repetitive and negative behaviors of children with ASD – A Pilot RCT“, Was written by WC Su, S. Srinivasan and a Bhat.
