No Single Motor Skill Predicts Preschool Executive Function, Study Suggests

A new study suggests that no single gross motor skill stands out as essential for higher executive function in young children. Instead, specific combinations of skills appear to travel together with stronger executive performance, pointing to what the researchers describe as multiple concurrent pathways leading to the same goal. The research team, led by Dongbin Lai and colleagues, analyzed test data from 67 children aged 3 to 6 years.

Rather than asking whether one skill predicts executive function in isolation, the study adopted a systems theory perspective and treated six gross motor skill subsystems as potential antecedent conditions: running, jumping, throwing, catching, kicking, and striking. The analysis used fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, or fsQCA, a method designed to identify combinations of conditions associated with an outcome, rather than estimating the isolated effect of each condition separately. A necessary condition analysis first established that none of the six motor skill subsystems, on its own, was a necessary condition for higher executive function in this sample.

In other words, no single skill was present in every case of strong executive performance, and no skill alone could be considered a prerequisite. The configurational analysis then identified three distinct combinations of skills associated with higher levels of executive function. The solution achieved a total consistency of 0.906, indicating a high degree of alignment between the identified configurations and the outcome, and an overall coverage of 0.496, meaning the pathways accounted for roughly half of the cases of higher executive function in the sample.

The three pathways were a combination of jumping, throwing, and striking actions; a combination of running, kicking, and striking actions; and a combination of running, throwing, and catching actions. The fsQCA approach treats conditions as sets rather than as independent linear predictors, which means the results should not be read as evidence that any single action drives cognitive development on its own.

The authors emphasize that the findings are preliminary and hypothesis-generating. The study is cross-sectional and based on a small sample of 67 children, so it identifies associations between configurations of motor skills and executive function rather than demonstrating that motor training causes improvements in executive function. Even with those limitations, the study offers a reframing of how movement and cognition may be linked in early childhood: instead of searching for one critical motor skill, the results suggest that future research might consider how clusters of complementary movement skills, such as locomotor skills like running paired with object-control skills like throwing and catching, co-occur in children with stronger executive function.

Subject of Research: Configurational associations between gross motor skill subsystems and executive function in preschool children

Article Title: The configurational pathways associated with executive function in preschool children: An fsQCA analysis based on gross motor skill development

Article References: Lai, D., Zhao, Z., Li, Z., Wu, J., & Wen, P. (2026). The configurational pathways associated with executive function in preschool children: An fsQCA analysis based on gross motor skill development. PLOS One, 21(10), e0361476. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0361476

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0361476

Keywords: executive function, preschool children, gross motor skills, fsQCA, motor development, systems theory, necessary condition analysis, early childhood, configurational pathways, developmental psychology, configurational, pathways