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Different types of physical activity are thought to differentially affect children's brain activation, via physiological mechanisms, or by activating similar brain areas during physical and cognitive tasks. Despite many behavioral studies relying on these mechanisms, they have been rarely studied. This study looks at both mechanisms simultaneously, by examining effects of two physical activity interventions (aerobic vs. cognitively-engaging) on children's brain activation. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data of 62 children (48.4% boys, mean age 9.2 years) was analyzed. Children's visuospatial working memory related brain activity patterns were tested using a Spatial Span Task before and after the 14-week interventions consisting of four physical education lessons per week. The control group followed their regular program of two lessons per week. Analyses of activation patterns in SPM 12.0 revealed no activation changes between pretest and posttest (p > .05), and no differences between the three conditions in pretest-posttest changes in brain activation (p > .05). Large inter-individual differences were found, suggesting that not every child benefited from the interventions in the same way. To get more insight into the assumed mechanisms, further research is needed to understand whether, when, for whom, and how physical activity results in changed brain activation patterns., (Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Research on prior knowledge activation has consistently shown that activating learners' prior knowledge has beneficial effects on learning. If learners activate their prior knowledge, this activated knowledge serves as a framework for establishing relationships between the knowledge they already possess and new information provided to them. Thus far, prior knowledge activation has dealt primarily with topic knowledge in specific domains. Students, however, likely also possess at least some metacognitive knowledge useful in those domains, which, when activated, should aid in the deployment of helpful strategies during reading., Aims: In this study, we investigated the effects of both prior topic knowledge activation (PTKA) and prior metacognitive knowledge activation (PMKA) on text comprehension scores., Samples & Methods: Eighty-eight students in primary education were randomly distributed amongst the conditions of the 2 × 2 (PTKA yes/no × PMKA yes/no) designed experiment., Results: Results show that activating prior metacognitive knowledge had a beneficial effect on text comprehension, whereas activating prior topic knowledge, after correcting for the amount of prior knowledge, did not., Conclusions: Most studies deal with explicit instruction of metacognitive knowledge, but our results show that this may not be necessary, specifically in the case of students who already have some metacognitive knowledge. However, existing metacognitive knowledge needs to be activated in order for students to make better use of this knowledge., (© 2015 The British Psychological Society.)