Open-skill vs. closed-skill sports and executive function in children and adolescents: a mini review of mechanisms and moderating factors

Executive function (EF), comprising inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, undergoes critical maturation during childhood and adolescence and predicts academic achievement, social adjustment, and mental health. Although physical exercise is now broadly accepted as a cognitive enhancer, growing evidence suggests that the type of motor activity matters: open-skill sports (e.g., basketball, badminton), performed in unpredictable, externally-paced environments demanding rapid perception, action coupling, may differ from closed-skill sports (e.g., running, swimming), performed at self-selected pace in stable settings, in their cognitive yields. This mini-review synthesizes recent evidence on (a) the differential effects of open- vs. closed-skill exercise on EF subcomponents in children and adolescents, (b) the underlying neurophysiological and molecular mechanisms, (c) moderators including dose parameters and individual characteristics, and (d) ongoing controversies and methodological gaps. Open-skill sports tend to confer larger benefits for inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility through enhanced conflict monitoring and improved neural efficiency, whereas closed-skill sports often outperform them on working memory and on hyperactivity/impulsivity in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Findings are, however, not uniform, and some syntheses report no significant overall difference between sport types, indicating that any advantage is domain-specific rather than absolute. These benefits are dose-dependent and moderated by age, sex, and baseline cognition. Future work should employ longitudinal designs, finer-grained sport taxonomies that move beyond the open, closed dichotomy, individualized intervention prescriptions, and multimodal neuroimaging to clarify the neural and molecular pathways linking exercise type to EF development.