Abstract
Executive functions (EFs) enable us to control our attention and behavior in order to set and work toward goals. Strong EF skills are linked to better academic performance, and greater health, wealth, and happiness in later life. Research into EF development has been hampered by a lack of scalable measures suitable for infancy through to toddlerhood. The 31-item Early Executive Functions Questionnaire (EEFQ) complements temperament measures by targeting cognitive and regulatory capabilities. Exploratory Factor Analysis (n=486 8- to 30-month-olds) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (n=317 9- to 30-month-olds) indicate Inhibitory Control, Flexibility, and Working Memory items load onto a common "Cognitive Executive Function (CEF)" factor, while Regulation items do not. The CEF factor shows strong factorial measurement invariance for sex, and partial strong factorial measurement invariance for age. CEF and Regulation scores show limited floor and ceiling effects, good internal consistency, short-term stability, and convergent validity with carer-report measures of attentional control. The EEFQ is sensitive to developmental change. Results indicate that the widely overlooked period between late infancy and early toddlerhood may be a sensitive period for EF development. The low-resource demands of the EEFQ afford the possibility to study emergent EFs at scale; opening up new opportunities in basic developmental and intervention research.
Highlights
Executive functions are the skills required for top-down control of attention and behavior
Where we expected a behavior or skill to be relatively infrequently used in day-to-day life and difficult for parents to report accurately, we identified games for parents to play with their children which would elicit that particular behavior
To enable us to identify temporal change in Cognitive Executive Function (CEF) scores beyond those that may be attributable to changes in the structure of CEF over time, age effects were analyzed using factor scores computed to reflect this partial measurement invariance
Summary
Executive functions are the skills required for top-down control of attention and behavior. These skills enable us to resist acting on impulse, adjust our actions during a changing situation, and work toward goals. When embedded in longitudinal designs, such work has potential to illuminate the impact of environmental factors on EF development and to inform intervention design for populations showing, or at risk for, EF difficulties. This approach requires large samples to be adequately powered to detect the small effects characteristic of infant individual differences (Pérez-Edgar et al, 2020)
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