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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (36 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Davis Previously Published Works (2014)
Developing cognitive control over one's thoughts, emotions, and actions is a fundamental process that predicts important life outcomes. Such control begins in infancy, and shifts during development from a predominantly reactive form (e.g. retrieving task-relevant information when needed) to an increasingly proactive form (e.g. maintaining task-relevant information in anticipation of needing it). While such developments are generally viewed as adaptive, cognitive abilities can also involve trade-offs, such that the benefits of developing increasingly proactive control may come with associated costs. In two experiments, we test for such cognitive trade-offs in children who are transitioning to proactive control. We find that proactive control predicts expected benefits in children's working memory, but is also associated with predicted costs in disproportionately slowing children under conditions of distraction. These findings highlight unique advantages and disadvantages of proactive and reactive control, and suggest caution in attempting to alter their balance during development.
    Cover page: Costs and benefits linked to developments in cognitive control
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Davis Previously Published Works (2018)
    Self-control emerges in a rich sociocultural context. Do group norms around self-control influence the degree to which children use it? We tested this possibility by assigning 3- to 5-year-old children to a group and manipulating their beliefs about in-group and out-group behavior on the classic marshmallow task. Across two experiments, children waited longer for two marshmallows when they believed that their in-group waited and their out-group did not, compared with children who believed that their in-group did not wait and their out-group did. Group behavior influenced children to wait more, not less, as indicated by comparisons with children in a control condition who were assigned to a group but received no information about either groups' delay behavior (Experiment 1). Children also subsequently valued delaying gratification more if their in-group waited and their out-group did not (Experiment 2). Childhood self-control behavior and related developmental outcomes may be shaped by group norms around self-control, which may be an optimal target for interventions.
      Cover page: Group Influences on Engaging Self-Control: Children Delay Gratification and Value It More When Their In-Group Delays and Their Out-Group Doesn’t
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Davis Previously Published Works (2011)
      Young children often perseverate, engaging in previously correct, but no longer appropriate behaviors. One account posits that such perseveration results from the use of stimulus-specific representations of a situation, which are distinct from abstract, generalizable representations that support flexible behavior. Previous findings supported this account, demonstrating that only children who flexibly switch between rules could generalize their behavior to novel stimuli. However, this link between flexibility and generalization might reflect general cognitive abilities, or depend upon similarities across the measures or their temporal order. The current work examined these issues by testing the specificity and generality of this link. In two experiments with 3-year-old children, flexibility was measured in terms of switching between rules in a card-sorting task, while abstraction was measured in terms of selecting which stimulus did not belong in an odd-one-out task. The link between flexibility and abstraction was general across (1) abstraction dimensions similar to or different from those in the card-sorting task and (2) abstraction tasks that preceded or followed the switching task. Good performance on abstraction and flexibility measures did not extend to all cognitive tasks, including an IQ measure, and dissociated from children's ability to gaze at the correct stimulus in the odd-one-out task, suggesting that the link between flexibility and abstraction is specific to such measures, rather than reflecting general abilities that affect all tasks. We interpret these results in terms of the role that developing prefrontal cortical regions play in processes such as working memory, which can support both flexibility and abstraction.
        Cover page: The Role of Representations in Executive Function: Investigating a Developmental Link between Flexibility and Abstraction
        • Thesis
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Davis Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2021)

        Whether we are at school, at work, running errands, or pursuing our hobbies, we are faced with tasks that place demands on our cognition. Cognitive demands are a core aspect of everyday life. Adults are sensitive to the cognitive demands of different tasks, and they use this sensitivity to adaptively calibrate their mental effort to the requirements of different tasks. Adults also use cognitive demands to guide their decision-making, typically to take courses of action that allow them to conserve their mental effort by avoiding unnecessary cognitive demands. As children grow up, they gain increasing independence in deciding for themselves which tasks to take on or avoid. Understanding how cognitive demands and how preferences for exerting or avoiding mental effort guide their decisions will be key to understanding cognitive development and children’s behavior. In this dissertation, I present research that begins to chart when children become sensitive to cognitive task demands, when relative cognitive demands guide children’s decisions to take on or avoid tasks, and how responses to different types of cognitive demands change across children’s development. Chapter 1 presents a synthesis of the available evidence, finding that although young children can monitor and adapt behavior according to cognitive task demands, spontaneous cognitive monitoring of demands to guide task selection only begins to arise across middle to late childhood. I build upon frameworks of metacognition to suggest putative cognitive mechanisms that may drive this developmental transition, as well as other social and environmental factors that may contribute to children’s sensitivity and adaptations to cognitive demands. Chapter 2 reports the results of a study designed to test sensitivity and adaptations to cognitive control demands, specifically task switching demands, across development. Participants were familiarized with two different tasks that required them to sort toys based on their color or shape. In one task, the sorting rules switched frequently, creating relatively higher cognitive demands; in another task, the sorting rules repeated frequently, creating lower demands. Like adults, older children aged 10 to 11 years showed sensitivity to these relative differences and avoided the more difficult switching task, as evidenced in their self-reported preferences and task decisions. However, younger children aged 6 to 7 years showed no such sensitivity and selected between the tasks at chance levels. Thus, these findings indicate that sensitivity and adaptive responses to cognitive demands emerges across childhood. Chapter 3 reports the results of a study designed to test whether children are differentially sensitive to specific types of cognitive demands. As children age, they transition from engaging cognitive control more reactively, in the moment, to increasingly engaging control proactively to meet anticipated task demands. Children and adults were familiarized with two different tasks that required them to sort toys based on their color or shape but varied when cognitive control was needed. In one task, a sorting rule appeared prior to the toy, allowing participants to proactively prepare; in the other task, the sorting rule only appeared when the toy to sort appeared, requiring reactive control. Adults and 10-year-old children were sensitive to these differences between tasks, and adults strongly preferred the proactive task, maximizing their response efficiency by preparing to sort toys. Five-year-old children were unaware of these differences between tasks, supporting findings of cognitive demand monitoring emerging across older childhood. However, the subset of younger children who did report differences between tasks preferred the reactive task. These findings suggest that preferred adaptations to cognitive demands differ across development, depending on the type of cognitive task demands and age. Chapter 4 incorporates a different task paradigm, the voluntary task switching paradigm, to assess mental effort avoidance in children and adults. In the voluntary task switching paradigm, participants choose when and how often to switch between tasks across trials. Switching between tasks requires mental effort, even when participants decide for themselves to switch tasks. Across three independent datasets, adults and older children exhibited evidence of decreasing their frequency of switching tasks over time, suggesting that they adaptively avoided cognitive task demands. In contrast, younger children did decrease their frequency of task switching over time, suggesting that younger children did not adapt their behavior to avoid cognitive demands. Overall, these findings suggest that older children and adults adapt their behavior in cognitive tasks to avoid cognitive demands but that younger children do not, providing further support for a developmental transition in the sensitivity to and avoidance of cognitive demands across late childhood.

          Cover page: Charting the Developmental Trajectory of Children’s Sensitivity to Cognitive Demands and Preferences for Avoiding Mental Effort
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Davis Previously Published Works (2023)
          Relational reasoning is a key component of fluid intelligence and an important predictor of academic achievement. Relational reasoning is commonly assessed using matrix completion tasks, in which participants see an incomplete matrix of items that vary on different dimensions and select a response that best completes the matrix based on the relations among items. Performance on such assessments increases dramatically across childhood into adulthood. However, despite widespread use, little is known about the strategies associated with good or poor matrix completion performance in childhood. This study examined the strategies children and adults use to solve matrix completion problems, how those strategies change with age, and whether children and adults adapt strategies to difficulty. We used eyetracking to infer matrix completion strategy use in 6- and 9-year-old children and adults. Across ages, scanning across matrix rows and columns predicted good overall performance, and quicker and higher rates of consulting potential answers predicted poor performance, indicating that optimal matrix completion strategies are similar across development. Indices of good strategy use increased across childhood. As problems increased in difficulty, children and adults increased their scanning of matrix rows and columns, and adults and 9-year-olds also shifted strategies to rely more on consulting potential answers. Adapting strategies to matrix difficulty, particularly increased scanning of rows and columns, was associated with good overall performance in both children and adults. These findings underscore the importance of both spontaneous and adaptive strategy use in individual differences in relational reasoning and its development.
            Cover page: The Development of Relational Reasoning: An Eyetracking Analysis of Strategy Use and Adaptation in Children and Adults Performing Matrix Completion
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Davis Previously Published Works (2020)
            How do children decide which tasks to take on? Understanding whether and when children begin to monitor cognitive demands to guide task selection is important as children gain increasing independence from adults in deciding which tasks to attempt themselves. In this article, we review evidence suggesting a developmental transition in children's consideration of cognitive demands when making choices about tasks: Although younger children are capable of monitoring cognitive demands to guide task selection, spontaneous monitoring of cognitive demands begins to emerge around 5-7 years. We describe frameworks for understanding when and why children begin to monitor cognitive demands, and propose additional factors that likely influence children's decisions to pursue or avoid cognitively demanding tasks.
              Cover page: Deciding What to Do: Developments in Children’s Spontaneous Monitoring of Cognitive Demands
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Davis Previously Published Works (2020)
              One simple marshmallow test in preschool children predicts an array of important life outcomes, according to multiple studies spanning several decades. However, a recent conceptual replication casts doubt on these famous findings. We conducted an independent, preregistered secondary analysis to test whether previously observed longitudinal associations between preschool delay of gratification and adolescent outcomes would be conceptually replicated. Associations were significant for three of the five outcomes we tested using the analytic approach employed in the original studies of the marshmallow test. Relationships between delay of gratification and problem behavior held in bivariate, multivariate, and multilevel models; in contrast, no significant relationships between delay and problem behavior were found in the other recent replication, even though both studies used the same data set. These relationships were better explained by social support than by self-control, suggesting that the marshmallow test is predictive because it reflects aspects of a child's early environment that are important over the long term. This novel interpretation of the classic findings points to new directions for intervention.
                Cover page: Same Data Set, Different Conclusions: Preschool Delay of Gratification Predicts Later Behavioral Outcomes in a Preregistered Study
                • Thesis
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Davis Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2023)

                Cognitive control–the executive processes and functions that allow us to coordinate, regulate, and adapt behaviors in the service of goals–shows a prolonged developmental time course across childhood and into early adulthood. One major development in cognitive control across the childhood years is children’s transition from primarily relying on reactive control, engaging control as needed in response to in-the-moment cues, to increasingly using proactive control, preparing cognitive resources to an anticipated need for control. While much work has examined this reaction to proactive transition and its influences on other executive functions and behaviors, few have empirically examined the psychometric properties of cognitive control measures used in different age groups. In this dissertation, I investigated the theoretical bases and measurement properties of commonly used indices of cognitive control (from the AX-Continuous Performance Task and the Cued Task Switching Paradigm) across ages (5-6 year-olds, 11-12 year-olds, and adults), and examine their relations with adaptive decision making, inhibitory control and context monitoring, and measures of mindfulness (child-report and breath accounting accuracy). Results showed that measures of cognitive control displayed different psychometric properties across age groups (Chapter 2), and proactive control in particular may be dissociable into implicit and explicit forms in 9 - 13 year olds, as a measure of implicit but not explicit proactive control predicted their response inhibition (Chapter 3). In terms of relationships to children’s behaviors, proactive control did not predict adaptive decision making in 5-6 year-olds (Chapter 2) nor self-reported mindfulness in 9 - 13 year-olds (Chapter 4). However, in 9 - 13 year olds, overall faster reaction times and accuracy rates in Cued Task Switching predicted higher levels of mindfulness as measured by breath counting accuracy, suggesting that cognitive control might play a role in state-level mindfulness. Overall, findings shed light on relationships between cognitive control and the development of adaptive behaviors and self-regulation, and highlight the need to examine existing cognitive measures to verify their developmental-appropriateness for children.

                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Davis Previously Published Works (2023)
                  Performance on lab assessments of executive functions predicts academic achievement and other positive life outcomes. A primary goal of research on executive functions has been to design interventions that improve outcomes like academic achievement by improving executive functions. These interventions typically involve extensive practice on abstract lab-based tasks and lead to improvements on these practiced tasks. However, interventions rarely improve performance on non-practiced tasks and rarely benefit outcomes like academic achievement. Contemporary frameworks of executive function development suggest that executive functions develop and are engaged within personal, social, historical, and cultural contexts. Abstract lab-based tasks do not well-capture the real-world contexts that require executive functions and should not be expected to provide generalized benefits outside of the lab. We propose a perspective for understanding individual differences in performance on executive function assessments that focuses on contextual influences on executive functions. We extend this contextual approach to training executive function engagement, rather than training executive functions directly. First, interventions should incorporate task content that is contextually relevant to the targeted outcome. Second, interventions should encourage engaging executive functions through reinforcement and contextual relevance, which may better translate to real-world outcomes than training executive functions directly. While such individualized executive functions interventions do not address systemic factors that greatly impact outcomes like academic achievement, given the extensive resources devoted to improving executive functions, we hypothesize that interventions designed to encourage children's engagement of executive functions hold more promise for impacting real-world outcomes than interventions designed to improve executive function capacities.
                    Cover page: Why Doesn’t Executive Function Training Improve Academic Achievement? Rethinking Individual Differences, Relevance, and Engagement from a Contextual Framework
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UC Davis Previously Published Works (2013)
                    Children often struggle to behave flexibly when they must use self-directed goals (e.g., doing homework without prompting) rather than externally driven goals (e.g., cleaning up when told). Such struggles may reflect the demands of selecting among many potential options, as required for self-directed control. The current study tested whether (a) 6-year-old children show difficulty in selecting among competing semantic representations, (b) providing category labels designed to reduce selection demands improves performance, and (c) such benefits transfer to self-directed flexibility. Selection was measured using the blocked cyclic naming task for the first time with children. Pictures were named repeatedly in either homogeneous blocks from the same category (e.g., all animals), which create high selection demands due to spreading semantic activation and engage effortful cognitive control, or mixed blocks with each picture from a different category. Children showed robust difficulty in selecting among options, as indexed by response time (RT) differences between homogeneous and mixed blocks. Providing subcategory labels designed to reduce selection demands by distinguishing among same-category items (e.g., "A cow is a farm animal. A cat is a pet.") improved selection. Providing superordinate categories (e.g., "A cow is an animal. A cat is an animal.") also improved selection, but these benefits were less robust, and subcategory labels led to greater benefits than superordinate category labels on a subsequent verbal fluency task. These results support a role for subcategory representations in reducing selection demands to aid self-directed flexibility while suggesting that some children may use superordinate category labels to activate subcategory representations on their own.
                      Cover page: So many options, so little control: Abstract representations can reduce selection demands to increase children’s self-directed flexibility
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