Abstract
Over the last two decades, there has been a growing interest in the study of the development of executive functions (EF) in preschool children due to their relationship with different cognitive, psychological, social and academic domains. Early detection of individual differences in executive functioning can have major implications for basic and applied research. Consequently, there is a key need for assessment tools adapted to preschool skills: Shape School has been shown to be a suitable task for this purpose. Our study uses Shape School as the main task to analyze development of inhibition, task-switching and working memory in a sample of 304 preschoolers (age range 3.25–6.50 years). Additionally, we include cognitive tasks for the evaluation of verbal variables (vocabulary, word reasoning and short-term memory) and performance variables (picture completion and symbol search), so as to analyze their relationship with EFs. Our results show age-associated improvements in EFs and the cognitive variables assessed. Furthermore, correlation analyses reveal positive relationships between EFs and the other cognitive variables. More specifically, using structural equation modeling and including age direct and indirect effects, our results suggest that EFs explain to a greater extent performance on verbal and performance tasks. These findings provide further information to support research that considers preschool age to be a crucial period for the development of EFs and their relationship with other cognitive processes.
Highlights
Executive functions (EF) comprise a family of mental processes associated with the functions of the prefrontal cortex (Müller and Kerns, 2015)
Others suggest the presence of multiple EF even in the early years (Usai et al, 2014; Howard et al, 2015; Skogan et al, 2016), the debate on this matter remains open as methodological differences have complicated the comparison of competing theoretical models of EF in this age group
The results show statistically significant differences between the 4–5 and 5–6 age groups on the switch efficiency [t(215) = −5.90, p = 0.001, Cohen’s d = −0.81] and inhibition-switch efficiency [t(215) = −5.05, p = 0.001, Cohen’s d = −0.66]
Summary
Executive functions (EF) comprise a family of mental processes associated with the functions of the prefrontal cortex (Müller and Kerns, 2015). They refer to high-level cognitive processes oriented toward reactive inhibition and the regulation of goal achievement behavior (Carlson et al, 2013). A number of authors suggest that while shifting and working memory have a specific component in addition to the common EF component, inhibition is thought to be contained completely within the common EF ability (Miyake and Friedman, 2012). Individual differences in inhibition are explained by what is common to all three EF and, Executive Functions in Preschoolers there is no inhibiting-specific factor (Friedman et al, 2008, 2011). Others suggest the presence of multiple EF even in the early years (Usai et al, 2014; Howard et al, 2015; Skogan et al, 2016), the debate on this matter remains open as methodological differences have complicated the comparison of competing theoretical models of EF in this age group (van der Ven et al, 2013; Wasserman and Wasserman, 2013)
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