# The effects of different sports activities on body scheme in preschoolers and primary school children: an experimental and theoretical analysis

## TL;DR

This study explores how different sports activities influence the development of body awareness in young children, using both experiments and theory.

## Contribution

The study introduces a control model based on active inference theory to explain how sports training shapes body schema in children.

## Key findings

- Older children engaged in sports showed significant differences in postural oscillations compared to younger children.
- Gymnasts exhibited an inaccurate body schema requiring motor hypercorrections, while team players showed balanced sensory integration.
- Skiers displayed an inert body pattern due to poor prediction of movement changes, leading to energy-consuming corrections.

## Abstract

Children are now introduced to sports at an early age, often beginning to learn complex movements between the ages of 3 and 5, which coincides with the formation of a body schema. Active inference theory suggests that the brain uses internal probabilistic models to assess the state of the body, adapting to sensory errors received from various sources. In preschool and primary school children, targeted sports training is thought to improve body awareness. We propose that targeted and prolonged sports training in preschool and primary school children develops specific features of body awareness that reflect the performance requirements of the corresponding sport.

Our experimental data confirmed age differences in postural oscillations during natural standing in children aged 5–9 years (n = 692) who were engaged in various sports, with similar data obtained by other researchers on a contingent of children not involved in sports. The studied parameters of athletes after 7 years were significantly different from those of younger children: radius (p < 0.001) and speed (p < 0.0001) of COP oscillations. The developed control model based on the active inference theory allowed identifying the body scheme as an internal cause explaining the experimental data in 8-year-old athletes with at least 3 years of experience: gymnasts have an inaccurate body scheme caused by errors in predicting the sensory effects of posture, which are compensated by motor hypercorrections; the body scheme of the team players is distinguished by balanced data from sensory sources; the inert body pattern of skiers is characterized by insufficiently accurate prediction of changes in movement conditions, which leads to energy-consuming corrections.

Our results show that the development of body schema in preschool-aged and primary school-aged children is closely related to multisensory integration and the specificity of the actions used in systematic sports. The model experiment demonstrated that practicing a certain sport forms the appropriate proportions between the modalities, determining the features of the internal body scheme of athletes of different specializations.