Abstract
Changing the way children make their response appears to sometimes, but not always, boost their inhibitory control-though interpreting existing findings is hampered by inconsistent methods and results. This study investigated the effects of delaying, and changing, the means of responding. Ninety-six preschoolers (Mage 46 months) completed tasks assessing inhibitory control, counterfactual reasoning, strategic reasoning, and false belief understanding. Children responded either immediately or after a delay, and either by pointing with their finger, or with a hand-held arrow. Delaying boosted performance on all tasks except false belief understanding; arrow-pointing only improved strategic reasoning. It is suggested that delay helps children work out the correct response; it is unlikely to help on tasks where this requirement is absent.
Highlights
Inhibitory control is the ability to overcome prepotent but task-inappropriate responses. Overcoming these responses is central to the ability to act freely on the world, and inhibitory control is vital to many aspects of development, including mental-state reasoning (Carlson & Moses, 2001), counterfactual thinking (Beck, Riggs, & Gorniak, 2009), academic performance (Gilmore et al, 2013), and resisting temptation (Murray & Kochanska, 2002)
For ease of comparison across tasks, analyses were conducted on percentage accuracy scores
We suggest that the lack of significance in the post hoc comparisons is a type II error arising from a conservative Bonferroni correction, and that the appropriate interpretation is that Windows task performance is improved both by delay and alternative response modes
Summary
Inhibitory control is the ability to overcome prepotent but task-inappropriate responses. Because the speed at which preschoolers respond is highly variable (Eckert & Eichorn, 1977), delay manipulations have tended to add an extra step to the standard task response— for example, by singing a song (e.g., Ling, Wong, & Diamond, 2016), or waiting for an unrelated event to finish (e.g., Beck, Carroll, Brunsdon, & Gryg, 2011) The rationale for this approach is that delaying responding reduces a task’s inhibitory demands by providing additional time—either for the correct response to be worked out (the Active Computation account: Diamond, Kirkham, & Amso, 2002), or for the activation of the incorrect response to fade (the Passive Dissipation account: Simpson & Riggs, 2007). Because methodologies vary greatly across studies, it remains unclear whether inconsistencies are due to the phenomena themselves being unreliable, or due to incidental task differences
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