Role of Childhood Aerobic Fitness in Successful Street Crossing LAURA CHADDOCK 1,2 , MARK B. NEIDER 3 , AUBREY LUTZ 2 , CHARLES H. HILLMAN 2,4 , and ARTHUR F. KRAMER 1,2 1 Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL; 2 Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL; 3 Department of Psychology, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL; and 4 Department of Kinesiology & Community Health, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL ABSTRACT CHADDOCK, L., M. B. NEIDER, A. LUTZ, C. H. HILLMAN, and A. F. KRAMER. Role of Childhood Aerobic Fitness in Successful Street Crossing. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc., Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 749–753, 2012. Increased aerobic fitness is associated with improved cognition, brain health, and academic achievement during preadolescence. Purpose: In this study, we extended these findings by examining the relationship between aerobic fitness and an everyday real-world task: street crossing. Because street crossing can be a dangerous multitask challenge and is a leading cause of injury in children, it is important to find ways to improve pedestrian safety. Methods: A street intersection was modeled in a virtual environment, and higher-fit (n = 13, 7 boys) and lower-fit (n = 13, 5 boys) 8- to 10-yr-old children, as determined by V ˙ O 2max testing, navigated trafficked roads by walking on a treadmill that was integrated with an immersive virtual world. Child pedestrians crossed the street while undistracted, listening to music, or conversing on a hands-free cellular phone. Results: Cell phones impaired street crossing success rates compared with the undistracted or music conditions for all participants (P = 0.004), a result that supports previous research. However, individual differences in aerobic fitness influenced these patterns (fitness  condition interaction, P = 0.003). Higher-fit children maintained street crossing success rates across all three conditions (paired t-tests, all P 9 0.4), whereas lower-fit children showed decreased success rates when on the phone, relative to the undistracted (P = 0.018) and music (P = 0.019) conditions. Conclusions: The results suggest that higher levels of childhood aerobic fitness may attenuate the impairment typically associated with multitasking during street crossing. It is possible that superior cognitive abilities of higher-fit children play a role in the performance differences during complex real-world tasks. Key Words: CHILDREN, COGNITION, DEVELOPMENT, EXERCISE, MULTITASKING, PHYSICAL ACTIVITY S treet crossing can be hazardous and especially dan- gerous for children. Pedestrian accidents are the sec- ond leading cause of injury and mortality in children between the ages of 5 and 14 in motorized countries (22). Because children cross streets daily to attend school, par- ticipate in after-school activities, and visit friends, childhood street crossing safety is an important public health concern. Pedestrian roadway navigation is a complex cognitive, perceptual, and motor challenge that involves the ability to multitask or perform more than one task concurrently. To successfully cross a street, pedestrians have to simulta- neously attend to the flow of traffic, monitor and remember vehicle distances and speeds, and execute a crossing as a function of roadway distance and individual walking speed. In today’s fast-paced society, the widespread and nearly constant use of technological devices has introduced addi- tional competition for attentional resources during everyday tasks such as crossing a street. Mobile phone and portable music player ownership is rapidly growing among children between the ages of 8 and 18, with cellular phone use in- creasing from 39% to 66% and music player use from 18% to 76% during the past 5 yr (13). Research demonstrates that conversing on a cell phone interferes with driving per- formance (2,27), and recent evidence suggests that mobile phones also impair street crossing success rates across the lifespan (17,18,26). Of particular note, child pedestrians have been found to be involved in more collisions with automo- biles while conversing on a cell phone compared with when undistracted (26). The street crossing findings provide con- verging evidence of performance decrements and response slowing using traditional laboratory-based multitask para- digms (e.g., dual-task, task switching) (7,8,10,20). Because of the high injury risk associated with street crossing and the rising use of potentially distracting technol- ogies, there is a growing research initiative to find strategies that improve child pedestrian safety. So far, the effective- ness of behavioral training interventions at street-side, on a computer, or in a nonimmersive virtual world is said to be limited (24). The present study uses a new approach to Address for correspondence: Laura Chaddock, M.A., Department of Psy- chology, The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 405 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801; E-mail: lchaddo2@illinois.edu. Submitted for publication July 2011. Accepted for publication September 2011. 0195-9131/12/4404-0749/0 MEDICINE & SCIENCE IN SPORTS & EXERCISE Ò Copyright Ó 2012 by the American College of Sports Medicine DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0b013e31823a90cb 749 APPLIED SCIENCES Copyright © 2012 by the American College of Sports Medicine. 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