Abstract
Inhibitory control is the ability to suppress competing, dominant, automatic, or prepotent cognitive processing at perceptual, intermediate, and output stages. Inhibitory control is a key cognitive function of typical and atypical child development. This study examined age-related trends of Stroop-like interference in 3 to 12-year-old children and young adults by administration of a computerized Stroop-like big–small task with reduced working memory demand. This task used a set of pictures displaying a big and small circle in black and included the same condition and the opposite condition. In the same condition, each participant was instructed to say “big” when viewing the big circle and to say “small” when viewing the small circle. In the opposite condition, each participant was instructed to say “small” when viewing the big circle and to say “big” when viewing the small circle. The opposite condition required participants to inhibit the prepotent response of saying the same, a familiar response to a perceptual stimulus. The results of this study showed that Stroop-like interference decreased markedly in children in terms of error rates and correct response time. There was no deterioration of performance occurring between the early trials and the late trials in the sessions of the day–night task. Moreover, pretest failure rate was relatively low in this study. The Stroop-like big–small task is a useful tool to assess the development of inhibitory control in young children in that the task is easy to understand and has small working memory demand.
Highlights
Inhibitory control is the ability to suppress competing, dominant, automatic, or prepotent cognitive processing at perceptual, intermediate, and output stages (Nigg, 2000; Friedman and Miyake, 2004; see Ikeda et al, 2013a, for a discussion of classification in inhibitory control)
Inhibitory control is often measured in young children by administering the Stroop-like day–night task (Gerstadt et al, 1994; for a review, see Montgomery and Koeltzow, 2010)
A 6 × 2 × 2 mixed-model analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted of the correct response time (RT)
Summary
Inhibitory control is the ability to suppress competing, dominant, automatic, or prepotent cognitive processing at perceptual, intermediate, and output stages (Nigg, 2000; Friedman and Miyake, 2004; see Ikeda et al, 2013a, for a discussion of classification in inhibitory control). Gerstadt et al (1994) reported that the Stroop-like interference, measured as the difference of response time (RT) between experimental (saying the opposite of what is shown for day/night cards) and control conditions (saying “day” or “night” to abstract shapes), decreases in children between ages 3.5 and 5. Some studies report deterioration in performance occurring between the first four trials and the last four trials in the sessions of the day–night task in young children (e.g., Gerstadt et al, 1994) These reports suggest that young children may have forgotten rules or that working memory demands add to the processing requirements of the task and compromise inhibitory mechanisms (Montgomery and Koeltzow, 2010). Unlike the standard “card” version of the day–night task, the task was computerized to evaluate the correct RT more precisely
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