Article summary with Executive function in the first three years of life: precursors, predictors and patterns by Hendry a.o. - 2016

What is the difference between effortful control and executive function?

Effortful control refers to the deliberate control of behavior and attention, which may be stimulus-driven or adult-directed. Executive function denotes a more independent, flexible, and goal-directed response to novel situations. The transition from effortful control to executive function is gradual and appears to occur over the course of the third year of life.

Why is it difficult to measure executive function in pre-schoolers?

It is difficult to establish ´pure´ measures of executive function in pre-schoolers, because their executive function is still developing, as well as their social, motor, and language skills. EF tasks require verbal comprehension and toddlers may misunderstand the requirements. Additionally, by taxing their verbal comprehension, an additional cognitive load is placed on the children, way may influence performance.

How does control of attention in infants develop?

Infants have selective attention from the first day of life, and during the first year they learn to direct and sustain that selectivity. This control of attention begins to emerge as early as four months, and undergoes a big transition around nine months, from which point individual differences in control of attention show moderate concurrent correlation and some predictive validity to measures of impulse control and cognitive flexibility within the third year of life.

What are causal and focused attention?

Focused attention, or selective sustained attention, is attention maintained on an object, event, or task for the purpose of learning more about it and/or reaching a goal. It is characterized by intense facial expression, a reduction of heart rate, minimal body movement, and a resistance to distracters. Causal attention on the other hand is characterized by engagement with stimuli in a repetitive and unfocused manner during which little to no information regarding the stimulus is processed.

What methods can be used for examining executive functioning in infants?

• The Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery provides well-constructed tasks and coding schemes that can be used in the laboratory or at home to capture individual differences in focused attention.
• The Freeze-frame Task can be used to measure focused attention. In this task, an engaging central animation stimulus is displayed, but briefly frozen if the infant looks to peripheral distracters.
• Parental or caregiver report can be used to avoid context-specific fluctuations and can be used in many different contexts. Concerns with this approach are the potential bias due to the influence of social desirability, limited accuracy of memories of events, and unfamiliarity with the typical ranges of infant behavior. Parents or caregivers can use the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised, the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire, or the Duration of Orienting scale.
• Effortful control can be measured by impulse control tasks and compliance tasks. Impulse control tasks involve suppressing a dominant response to reach for a desired item until permission has been granted. Compliance tasks require participants to engage in typical but mundane activities.
• Processing speed can be measured with two approaches: index processing through ocular reaction time (e.g. Gap-Overlap task and Visual Expectation Paradigm) and index processing through looking time to stimuli (e.g. visual recognition techniques).
• Response shifting can be measured with the A-not-B task.

What is the executive attention network?

Executive attention is one of three networks whereby the alerting system maintains sensitivity to incoming information (sustained attention), the orienting system drives the ability to respond to certain types of input and ignore others (selective attention) and to shift between targets. The executive attention network exerts top-down volitional control and recruits resources that are necessary for goal-directed behavior, conflict resolution, and error detection.

What are temperament, reactivity, and self-regulation?

Temperament is defined as individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation. Reactivity refers to an individual´s response to a stimulus change or alteration in the environment, which is manifested in changes in behavior and/or the physiological systems. Self-regulation refers to the set of processes used to modulate this reactivity. Individual differences in self-regulation emerge at eight months of age and have predictive validity to later executive function from the second year of life. Individual differences in self-regulation emerge in interaction with biologically-driven differences in reactivity and sex, and that relationship can be moderated by environmental factors such as parenting.

What is the difference between hot and cool executive function?

Hot tasks are those for which a proximal extrinsic reward or punishment for performance is included. Think of impulse control tasks which call for suppressing an emotionally-charged response to a desirable object. Cool tasks involve more abstract problems in which no extrinsic motivator for performance is included. Think of the selective application of a rule. Problem solving usually involves an interactive relationship between hot and cool executive function, as a rapid emotional response informs a simple approach or avoid response, which is then monitored and refined if necessary on the basis of more abstract if-then rules.

What is processing speed?

Processing speed entails both rapid assimilation of sensory input and effective encoding strategy. Processing speed accounts for much of the variability in performance of executive function tasks and is related to common executive function, updating, and shifting. Individual difference in processing speed show in early infancy and have predictive validity from five months. Infants who make shorter glances to new stimuli both process information quicker and encode global features rather than local features.

How does cognitive flexibility develop?

Cognitive flexibility goes through overlapping stages of improvement in maintaining task set, updating task set, shifting task set, and resolving conflict within or between task sets. By the end of the third year of life, each of the core elements of cognitive flexibility are present. The ability to combine and control these abilities continue to develop slowly from age three.

What is shifting?

Shifting refers to the ability of changing response behavior from using one rule to using another rule. Switch costs are task specific: tasks that demand more intensive control efforts, for example because they require an action that is not yet well rehearsed, are more difficult to suppress or shift away from. Task-specific switch costs have been explained by Parallel Distributed Processing and the Dynamic Field Theory.

What do Parallel Distributed Processing and Dynamic Field Theory in common when explaining task-specific switch costs?

Both models prioritize the importance of the memory trace in perseverative responses and state that inhibitory control in response shifting tasks is itself a behavioral product of working memory. A strong representation of the required actions for the tasks leads to execution of the action. A weak representation will enable a pre-potent response to win. This is why a U-shaped pattern of development is often observed in set shifting performance. Perseveration can only take place once the infant has developed a skill sufficiently enough to create a strong memory trace of that skill performance.

What is working memory?

Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. It is a multi-componential system requiring the integration of domain-specific short-term memory and domain-general working memory capacity.

What is working memory capacity?

Working memory capacity refers to the maintenance or activation of information in the presence of interference or response competition. It has both an activation mechanism (organizing the holding in mind of the task goal and relevant sensory input with short term memory) and an inhibitory mechanism (inhibiting all competing information and processing).