The mediating role of physical activity in the association between socioeconomic status and cognitive functioning in children aged 8–12 years

The individual relationships of both physical activity (PA) and socioeconomic status (SES) with cognitive functioning are well established. Research specifically considering the role of PA in the relationship between individual SES and cognitive functioning in children is limited. The present study evaluates whether PA mediates the association between SES and cognitive functioning. Cognitive functioning and cardiorespiratory fitness, a reliable and sensitive measure of recent habitual PA, were studied in 358 children from regular primary schools and from varying SES environments. Cognitive functioning was assessed with a broad range of measures tapping into main cognitive functions (executive functioning) and lower-level cognitive functions (attention and information processing). A principal component analysis was performed on the cognitive measures derived from computerised cognitive tasks resulting in 5 cognitive components. The results of the mixed model analysis confirm that SES is positively associated with intelligence and show that children from lower SES environments performed more poorly on the cognitive component assessing verbal- and visuospatial working memory than children from higher SES environments. No associations were found between SES and three attentional components (attention accuracy, attention speed, and executive attention), nor was PA identified as a mediator in these associations. Although SES was not significantly related to the component assessing response inhibition and information processing, our analysis shows that this non-significant relationship was mediated by PA. Collectively, interventions targeting PA could help reduce the SES-cognitive functioning gap.