1. Vignette: the “cognitive training” board

It is Thursday, a little after nine, in an early childhood room this vignette does not name. The scene is composite: it condenses a category error that the rest of the article examines against sources. It is not a sample, it has no effect size, and it must not be read as a result. On the rug, four children of four and five build a shop out of blocks. Whoever “sells” must remember the order —two long pieces stand for bread— wait until the other has finished “paying,” and change roles when a classmate wants the cash register. One child reaches out too soon. The turn rule is in the air, not on a screen. A meter away, a tablet shows a grid of figures that disappear. A voice says “very good.” In the corner, a star, a level, and a bar: minutes of “cognitive training.”

The teacher shows the bar to the person coordinating the visit. “We already work on executive function. The board says memory went up.” In the shop, no one has looked at that bar. The child who just received the star is the same child who reaches out: the star does not tell him to wait, and the adult, in that instant, does not name the wait. She reads a score. In the afternoon, at home, another screen summarizes the day: eighteen minutes, a badge, the phrase “brain in shape.” The caregiver answers that “he already did his part.” The struggle over the box, and the sentence that might have held the turn, do not enter the summary. The minutes do.

The confusion is precise. Executive function has been used as the name for the inhibition of a hand, for the memory of an order inside a role, and for the flexibility of giving up the box. And support has been used as the name for something else: a grid, a star, a bar, and a pack of “cognitive” exercises with no play protocol and no observation guide. The error is not having a tablet in the room. It is reading the score as if it were already the mediation. The vignette is not data: there is no comparison and no gain figure. It fixes the ceiling the market already treats as support, and it leaves the question of what counts as a component in context and what remains an artifact.

2. Problem: what executive function means in class

In the classroom of ages three to five, the expression has become elastic. It fits in a report, in a family workshop, and on an app’s label. Sometimes it names stopping an impulse; sometimes, remembering a two-step instruction; sometimes, changing a rule; sometimes all of that together, plus attention and “the brain.” If everything is executive function, any exercise announced as cognitive can be presented as support, and the score inherits a prestige the shop episode did not give it.

The corpus does not authorize that collapse. Lambert et al. (2026) work on inhibitory control —suppressing responses to distractions during a task— with kindergarten games, not with a ranking. Traverso et al. (2021), with 143 children in the last year of preschool, separate working memory and inhibition: the first is associated with most of the number components examined; the second, with the seriation of numerals. Linking sets to numerals depends on the number sequence, not on those components. Status: a differential contribution, not a global training score. Cumming et al. (2022), in the kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (N = 15,827), find that working memory at entry is negatively associated with parent-reported externalizing problems and with teacher-reported internalizing problems. Cognitive flexibility shows no significant associations. A pack that promises to train “the executive functions” as a block does not survive that dissociation.

Deodhar and Bertenthal (2023) cut on the side of attention. With 137 preschool children and two tasks per process, the confirmatory model that fits best separates attentional control —sustained and selective— from the other executive-function processes, although the two are related. Status: a structural finding. An app that trains “attention” and returns an executive-function score has fused, in the label, what the analysis kept apart. Etokabeka (2025), from structured play, speaks of self-regulation, memorization, and cognitive flexibility sustained by guiding, modeling, and taking up what the child proposes. That is not the object of a grid. Wang and Feng (2024) ask, with a latent growth model, whether executive function weighs more than emotion understanding in peer relationships. The result is not in the open abstract consulted for this kit, and it is not invented. The object is: the component appears in the bond with other children, not in a badge.

There is a quieter substitution. Loomis et al. (2023) associate inhibitory control and teacher closeness with expulsion risk, and closeness mediates that path: inhibition matters together with the relationship, not instead of it. Design inference: a dashboard that does not look at the relationship is not measuring that path. Calling it support to have offered the tablet or the weekly report closes the question too soon. Without situated play and without scaffolding —goals in context, real turns, shared inhibition, observation, and transfer— the score, the app, the dashboard, and the pack do not constitute that support. The craft is the mediation that sets play, care, and conversation in place. No effect size of play against screens is manufactured here.

3. State of the art: situated play versus apps

Four strata should not be welded together in the “cognitive training” brochure. The construct gathers processes that are not interchangeable, with attention beside them and not inside the same factor by decree (Deodhar and Bertenthal, 2023; Traverso et al., 2021; Cumming et al., 2022). Situated play and scaffolding cover structured play, role play, the outdoors, waiting, cognitively engaging movement, and guidance that does not erase the child’s initiative (Hamamcı and Balaban Dagal, 2022; Etokabeka, 2025; Arslan Çiftçi et al., 2025; Fuji and Sugimura, 2023; Trawick-Smith et al., 2026; Sanchez, 2025; Lambert et al., 2026; Orr and Dorfberger, 2023; Giles and Johnson, 2026; Preston et al., 2025). Social context makes those processes visible: peers, classroom skill composition, the teacher relationship, and conflict and closeness with father and mother (Guedes et al., 2026; Yang, Q. et al., 2023; Wang and Feng, 2024; Loomis et al., 2023; Hector-Nathan et al., 2026). The screen, in this kit, is read as dependence, problematic use, or interference, not as a gym (Di et al., 2026; Özcan et al., 2026; Yang, X. et al., 2023). Where print year and online record diverge, the print year is cited: Trawick-Smith et al. remain 2026.

Sanchez (2025) occupies a narrow place. One teacher scaffolds writing inside guided play, in four classroom spaces, with the child’s agency and a goal. She does not measure executive function. Status: a framework of practice. Extending that scaffolding to self-regulation goals is an inference of this article. Guided play, cooperative formats, and the morning meeting are not reopened here. The question is whether inhibition, working memory, and flexibility are exercised with someone who observes, or whether they are declared done because an app returned a level.

Guiberson (2026) teaches dialogic reading strategies through tutorials, between social media and storytime. It is not a memory app and not a ranking of gains. With no open abstract, no effect on children’s executive function is attributed to it. Category inference: a screen can carry a protocol for the adult who is about to converse. Xin et al. (2026) examine jigsaw performance and inhibition; with no coefficient, the direction is not invented. A material can be the occasion for stopping a wrong piece. The material is not the support. The empirical detail is left to the findings.

4. Method: PRISMA-lite review, 2021–2026

A critical narrative review was conducted with PRISMA-lite transparency, not a meta-analysis and not a rate of “cognitive-training success.” The purpose is categorical: what counts as support for executive function when there is situated play and scaffolding, and what remains at the ceiling of the artifact. The window is 2021–2026. DOI verification in Crossref corresponds to 24 September 2026, slot 09:02 (America/Mexico_City). The kit’s gate retained 185 records with a verified DOI. The curation fixed in fuentes.md left 24 works. This review cites all of them. No exclusion diagram is rebuilt with counts the gate does not document step by step: to assert an unrecorded discard ledger would be to invent it.

Inclusion: years 2021–2026, using the print year when it diverges; early childhood tied to executive function, play, physical activity, peers, caregiving, or media; a DOI verified that day; relevance to the contrast between situated play and training scores. No authors, journals, or DOIs were added. Left out were catalogs without a paper, coefficients absent from the title or the abstract, and the temptation to turn this review into a treatise on guided play, cooperation, or the class meeting. Those formats are not the object. Inhibition, working memory, and flexibility, set against the app and the dashboard, are.

Each source carries a mark. Empirical finding: what the abstract or the title allows one to say, including the silence when the coefficient is missing. Framework: a practice that does not trial executive support. Design inference: what this article concludes and does not attribute to the source. Sample sizes, standard deviations, and significant paths come from abstracts retrieved on 24 September 2026. Where there is no abstract, the text stays with the object. There are no pooled effects. The criteria in the discussion are design hypotheses, not a center standard. A star on a grid is not a mediated turn.

5. Findings: play, inhibition, and scaffolding

Play enters as observed behavior, not as a slogan. Hamamcı and Balaban Dagal (2022) have teachers rate play, emotion regulation, and executive function in 127 preschool children in Turkey. Executive function and emotion regulation moderate reticence, solidarity play, and social play; there are associations with each play behavior; there are sex differences in executive function, parallel play, and rough-and-tumble play. The direction of those sex differences is not in the abstract, and it is not invented. Status: a relational finding. Training alone on a grid does not inherit that model by calling itself cognitive. Etokabeka (2025) interviews and observes eight teachers in four South African preschools —national framework, independent schools, Montessori, and Reggio Emilia. Six themes: guiding, modeling, instructing, repeating, incorporating what the child leads, and attending to interests. She concludes that structured play supports executive skills in interaction. Status: a qualitative finding, with no percentage of improvement. Arslan Çiftçi et al. (2025) report a group-play intervention. With no open abstract, there is no direction and no magnitude. The object is enough to exclude the dashboard: what is named is group play.

Fuji and Sugimura (2023), with 55 Japanese children aged four to six, find that the frequency of role play and self-regulatory behavior during role play are associated with classroom self-regulation, but frequency is not associated with that behavior inside the episode. Status: an empirical dissociation. Playing often is not, in those data, regulating oneself inside the scene. Design inference: a counter of minutes or of sessions does not see the inhibition in the shop. Trawick-Smith et al. (2026) study the association of solitary and social pretend play with inhibitory control. With no coefficient, neither form is declared heavier. The title keeps both, and to crown one would betray it.

Orr and Dorfberger (2023), with 78 children, their teachers, and their families, point to forest kindergarten as the main factor involved in ecological cognition and in executive function, in a design that includes traditional kindergarten and home. It is not a forest recipe. It is a shared setting inside the model, which a memory grid does not document in this corpus. Giles and Johnson (2026) listen to twelve teachers —four Montessori, four from nature-based programs, and four from public school. Seven themes, not listed in the abstract: labels are not invented. Teachers link the outdoors to different domains and to nature, with nuances by program. Preston et al. (2025) title an immediate impact of cognitively engaging physical activity. With no figure in the open abstract, the object is retained —movement that demands control, not a sedentary grid— and so is the immediate character, which is not transfer to the following week.

Lambert et al. (2026) observe three children in their classroom. At baseline they miss emotional control and staying on task. With Uno, Perfection, matching cards, and an I Spy book, in a small group, a ten-minute momentary sample during free play records more on-task behavior and more emotional control. There is no percentage in the abstract. Someone watched the center, not a minute bar. Xin et al. (2026) examine the jigsaw and inhibitory control. With no coefficient, the object remains a material that can require stopping the wrong piece. That the material is not support until there is observation is an inference of this article, not a result of theirs.

The component does not float free of relationships. Loomis et al. (2023) show that teacher closeness mediates between inhibition and expulsion risk (88 children, 22 Head Start classrooms). Hector-Nathan et al. (2026), with 71 fathers and mothers of four-year-olds (36 boys) and nine months of follow-up, find that conflict with the mother and with the father predicts more executive problems and mediates transmission from the adult’s executive function, with age and verbal ability controlled. Cumming et al. (2022) add that cognitive stimulation moderates the path from working memory to parent-reported externalizing problems, and that behavior management moderates the path to parent-reported internalizing problems. Warmth is not left as a moderator in the abstract. Flexibility shows no associations. Guedes et al. (2026) observe self-regulation across play situations and peer effects: with no abstract there is no sign, but the child is not left as an isolated app user. Yang, Q. et al. (2023) study classroom skill composition with no importable coefficient: the individual ranking does not describe that group. Wang and Feng (2024) leave executive function in the question about peer relationships, without a winner declared here against emotion understanding.

Three limits keep the block from being read as permission. Sanchez (2025) does not supply an executive measure: she portrays the scaffolding of writing. Guiberson (2026) leaves the tutorial on the adult’s dialogic reading. Lynch et al. (2023) block taking program time for the construct. In a pandemic year of low in-person attendance, Head Start children in Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin gain 0.05 standard deviations in executive function from fall to spring, against 0.27 in print knowledge and between 0.45 and 0.71 in early numeracy (N = 336 in the fall; between 237 and 250 in the spring; mean age 51 months; 46% Hispanic, 36% Black non-Hispanic, and 52% girls at baseline). More in-person time is discussed for two of three numeracy domains, not for executive function. Neither classroom minutes nor tablet minutes inherit, by being minutes, an executive change.

6. Findings: screens, training, and transfer limits

The screen sources do not evaluate a brain-training brand. They model dependence, problematic use, and interference. Di et al. (2026) survey 690 parents of children aged three to six. Parenting stress is positively associated with screen dependence and negatively associated with interaction quality and with executive function; interaction is positively associated with executive function. The total indirect effect is significant through interaction, through executive function, and through the serial path. The model controls sex, age, education, and income, with resampling. Status: cross-sectional mediation, not causation and not a trial of unplugging in order to train. More stress travels with more dependence and with weaker executive function, through a poorer interaction. It does not travel with a training benefit. To read the child’s minutes as proof of support is to read this counter backwards.

Özcan et al. (2026) formulate in the title the trajectory their panel tests: early media use predicts later executive-function difficulties through problematic use, with cross-lags and bidirectional relations in middle childhood. With no open coefficient, no numerical path is imported. The category retained is difficulty, not a curve of “EF gains.” Yang, X. et al. (2023) specify parents’ problematic phone use, technoference as mediation, and the child’s age as moderation. With no imported magnitude, the title is read as the study’s design. Technoference names the interruption of interaction by the adult’s device. Design inference: a teacher who looks away from the turn to read “cognitive minutes” practices a similar gesture of absence. It is not the same variable. It is the same abandonment of the episode.

Among the 24 works there is no trial whose object is to validate a brain-training score, a memory app, or a gains ranking as support with play, turns, observation, and transfer. Media titles run toward dependence and interference. Play titles run toward the shared situation. Guiberson (2026) does not fill the gap: the tutorial teaches the adult a dialogic practice. A screen can carry a craft and still not replace the wait. Confusing the “brain in shape” summary with that tutorial is the vignette’s error: both screens shine, and they are not the same category.

Transfer is not declared by slogan. Fuji and Sugimura (2023) separated frequency and regulation inside the role: completing grids would be a frequency, and no one in this corpus measured the jump to the shop. Deodhar and Bertenthal (2023) separate attention and executive function. Traverso et al. (2021) show components that do not feed the same number skills. Lambert et al. (2026) observed the change in free play. Preston et al. (2025) claim an immediate and bodily impact. Etokabeka (2025) describes a repertoire that does not fit in a pack used alone. Lynch et al. (2023) show a small executive movement even inside a program. Design inference: transfer to the turn, the yard, or the role has to be seen in the episode. This corpus does not demonstrate it for brain training, and it does not authorize pretending that the demonstration has already been made.

7. Anonymized classroom case (ages 3–5)

The case does not enlarge the corpus. It is an anonymized note from a public early childhood center, city omitted, a mixed group of ages three to five. Eight mornings of play, over two weeks, about two hours each, across the yard, the role-play corner, and a table with a tablet for matching figures. There is no battery, no analytic N, no d, no r, no baseline, and no comparison group. The names are pseudonyms. Anyone looking for an effect of the app or of the yard is misreading the genre.

In the yard, a statues game. “L.,” aged four, stops, laughs because a classmate moves, and moves again. The adult does not send her to the tablet “to train attention”: she restarts the signal and names stillness. There is inhibition in the body, with others, and a minimal scaffold. There is no evidence that L. improved a score. There is evidence that, in that minute, the response kept the game. In the corner, “M.,” aged five, remembers two orders in the seller’s role; “R.,” aged three, wants the box; M. grips it and then lets go when the teacher asks what the seller says. Memory of the order, inhibition of the grip, flexibility of the change. No increase was measured. The conversation entered before the score.

The tablet rotated in short stretches, with a voice of approval and a progress bar. In a brief meeting a “cognitive training” report appeared, with minutes and levels. No one crossed it with the statue or with the shop. There is also no negative correlation: there was no protocol joining score and episode. The absence is one of craft, not a null result. A die used another morning for color turns is as much an artifact as the tablet. The difference is the shared rule, the real wait, and someone watching the wait. When the die was held in view and the color’s owner was named, the turn was observable. When the bar was shown in the meeting, the turn was no longer in the conversation. The notes do not authorize declaring that the bar was support, or that the yard “worked,” or that another center would obtain the same. They are not a test. They are a reminder of the criteria that follow, anchored in the corpus and not in these eight mornings.

8. Discussion: criteria for genuine support

The four criteria are design hypotheses. They are not an inspection norm, they are not validated as a battery, and they are not checked off on a list by the door. They are stated because the corpus separates the component exercised in context from the artifact that announces it. Whoever cannot speak of them without changing the subject may declare that there was a grid, a minute, or a level. They may not declare support for executive function.

Shared social context. Social and solidarity play enter Hamamcı and Balaban Dagal (2022). The role in Fuji and Sugimura (2023) has an interlocutor. Trawick-Smith et al. (2026) do not discard solitary pretend play, and they do not allow inhibition to be treated as a private matter between the child and a score. Guedes et al. (2026), Yang, Q. et al. (2023), and Wang and Feng (2024) place peers, classroom composition, and peer relationships in view. Loomis et al. (2023) place teacher closeness; Hector-Nathan et al. (2026), conflict with father and mother. Etokabeka (2025), Lambert et al. (2026), Orr and Dorfberger (2023), and Giles and Johnson (2026) situate the experience in the group, the forest, or the yard. Design hypothesis: without interlocution —a turn, a role, or a signal for more than one body— the score does not meet the criterion. It does not require a cooperative-play format or a class meeting. The grid used alone, with the shop beside it, does not have that interlocution.

Situated teacher observation. Etokabeka (2025) described guiding, modeling, instructing, repeating, yielding the lead, and watching interests: she did not evaluate a board. Lambert et al. (2026) recorded ten minutes of free play while watching the task and emotion. Guedes et al. (2026) put that observation in the title. Giles and Johnson (2026) show that teachers’ thinking about the outdoors sustains the yard. Sanchez (2025), with no executive measure, describes the lack of guidance for scaffolding. Fuji and Sugimura (2023) separate the frequency a dashboard counts from regulation inside the role, which is what has to be seen. Design hypothesis: there is observation when someone can say, of an episode, whether there was a wait, whether the instruction held, or whether the child changed with the rule. There is none when the only statement is that the level went up.

Evidence of transfer to everyday play. To transfer is not to change the grid’s background. Traverso et al. (2021), Deodhar and Bertenthal (2023), and Cumming et al. (2022) show components that do not travel alike, attention that does not dissolve into the executive factor, and caregiving that remains inside the model. Lynch et al. (2023) show a small executive movement beside larger academic movements. Fuji and Sugimura (2023) separate role-play frequency from regulation inside the role. Preston et al. (2025) claim an immediate impact, not a delayed one. Design hypothesis: the evidence that would count is the die, the statue, or the shop, not the app’s report. A ranking of “EF gains” that does not open that episode renames it. It does not transfer. The eight mornings do not simulate that crossing: by design they did not join score and behavior.

Not replacing play with a digital drill. The criterion does not ban the screen, and it does not make cardboard virtuous. It denies that a pack of exercises may occupy play and conversation and still be called support. Di et al. (2026), Özcan et al. (2026), and Yang, X. et al. (2023) associate dependence, problematic use, and technoference with weaker executive function or with difficulties, not with a brain gym. Lambert et al. (2026) and Xin et al. (2026) let games and the jigsaw enter only with a practice and, in the first case, with observation. Forest, yard, and movement (Orr and Dorfberger, 2023; Giles and Johnson, 2026; Preston et al., 2025) are not a chair in front of the grid. Guiberson (2026) shows the screen of another category: a tutorial for the adult’s dialogic reading. Design hypothesis: the drill may coexist with play. It may not replace it.

The four criteria are read together. A yard without observation does not demonstrate transfer. Watching the app that replaced the turn documents the substitution; it does not redeem it. An individual ranking loses the context at the moment of reporting it. The jump counted only inside the software is not the shop. The corpus contains no branded method that closes the question. What remains is the craft already described: guide and yield, watch the corner and not the bar, do not confuse frequency with regulation or screen minutes with interaction. The board may be shown. It does not close executive function.

9. Limits

The review is narrative. PRISMA-lite names the criteria and the refusal to fabricate an exclusion diagram, not a pooled effect of play against apps. Without an open abstract on 24 September 2026 remained Arslan Çiftçi et al. (2025), Guedes et al. (2026), Trawick-Smith et al. (2026), Yang, Q. et al. (2023), Xin et al. (2026), Guiberson (2026), and Wang and Feng (2024), plus the coefficients of Preston et al. (2025), Özcan et al. (2026), and Yang, X. et al. (2023). There the text stays with the object. To call that caution a negative result would be another invention. Deodhar and Bertenthal (2023) are cited up to the two-factor model the retrieved source supports, and no further.

The figures do not leave their study: 127 children (Hamamcı and Balaban Dagal, 2022), 78 (Orr and Dorfberger, 2023), 71 dyads and nine months (Hector-Nathan et al., 2026), eight teachers (Etokabeka, 2025), three children with no percentage of increase (Lambert et al., 2026), 88 children and 22 classrooms (Loomis et al., 2023), 55 children (Fuji and Sugimura, 2023), 143 and number knowledge, not role play (Traverso et al., 2021), N = 15,827 in kindergarten and not in front of an app (Cumming et al., 2022), 0.05 standard deviations in a pandemic year (Lynch et al., 2023), 690 families in a cross-section (Di et al., 2026), and twelve teachers with seven unlisted themes (Giles and Johnson, 2026). None is a universal parameter. Sanchez (2025) is writing, not executive function. Guiberson (2026) is dialogic training, not a child’s drill. The case is not a study and does not correct coefficients. The criteria are hypotheses. No brands were evaluated. Turkey, Japan, South Africa, the United States, forest, and public preschool block both a single effect and a purely local diagnosis. This text does not redo guided play, the cooperative format, or the class meeting.

10. Conclusions

A “brain training” score, a working-memory app, a minutes dashboard, or an exercise pack without situated play and without scaffolding does not constitute support for executive function in early childhood education. The corpus separates the component from the announcement: inhibition together with the teacher relationship (Lambert et al., 2026; Loomis et al., 2023), memory and inhibition that do not predict the same things (Traverso et al., 2021), attention that is not confused with the rest of the construct (Deodhar and Bertenthal, 2023), flexibility that does not replicate working memory and caregiving that moderates paths (Cumming et al., 2022), role-play frequency distinct from regulation inside the role (Fuji and Sugimura, 2023), forest, yard, and movement as a situation (Orr and Dorfberger, 2023; Giles and Johnson, 2026; Preston et al., 2025), teacher guidance and yielding (Etokabeka, 2025), and screens that travel with dependence or with difficulties (Di et al., 2026; Özcan et al., 2026; Yang, X. et al., 2023). The social play in Hamamcı and Balaban Dagal (2022) is not the star in the vignette.

Where there was no abstract, no result was feigned. Group play, peers, classroom composition, solitary and social pretend play, the jigsaw, the dialogic tutorial, and peer relationships remain objects (Arslan Çiftçi et al., 2025; Guedes et al., 2026; Yang, Q. et al., 2023; Trawick-Smith et al., 2026; Xin et al., 2026; Guiberson, 2026; Wang and Feng, 2024). Lynch et al. (2023) block using program minutes as a proxy. In the classroom case there was no N and no effect: there were turns, a yard, and a role, and a report with no crossing to those episodes. The craft is mediation. It designs play, care, and conversation with social meaning. The hypotheses ask for shared context, situated observation, transfer to everyday play, and not replacing that play with a drill. They are not a norm. The teacher may have a tablet. She may not show the bar and treat executive function as done while a hand reaches out and no one names the wait.

Laboratorio Editorial de NEXTECH.IA / Ingeniero Mitre.

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