Abstract
The ability to apply rules for environmental adaptation is crucial for human life. This capacity may require high-order cognitive control, such as when managing personal behavior by selecting among context-dependent internal rules. This process is poorly understood in children, especially in terms of the age at which multiple-rules processing becomes possible. We created a child-appropriate “rule management paradigm” to elucidate developmental changes in rule processing, and used it to investigate the trajectory of the rule management system in 322 children aged 4 to 6 years, with comparison to 57 adults. We found age-specific capacities in multiple-rules processing, with the majority of 4-year-olds failing at concurrent management of multiple-rules processing, a capacity that became well developed by age 6. Task performance in multiple-rules processing improved steeply with age and approached the adult level by late age 6. By contrast, single-rule processing on single-feature stimuli approached the adult level by age 5. Our main findings suggest that the critical period for the development of the multiple-rules processing system occurs before age 7, and is associated with the developmental period of the rule management system and other cognitive resources.
Highlights
The ability to apply rules for environmental adaptation is crucial for human life
The present study investigated age-related development of the rule management system by studying multiple-rules processing in children ages 4 to 6 years old
Task performance in the multiple-rules condition approached that of adults by late age 6, while single-rule performance approached adult levels by age 5 (Simple and Alternative conditions) in cases where there was no conflict in the stimuli
Summary
The ability to apply rules for environmental adaptation is crucial for human life. This capacity may require high-order cognitive control, such as when managing personal behavior by selecting among context-dependent internal rules. It has been reported that this process can be managed by children by age 56–8 This task is mainly applied to younger children’s rule systems to examine set-shifting or inhibitory control by changing between rule sets, but it is incapable of elucidating the development of integrative processing of rules, such as concurrent processing for multiple rules responding to stimuli at a higher order of EF. It has been suggested that the development of EFs reflects a more qualitative change in cognitive function between ages 3 and 5, whereas later developments reflect quantitative refinements and enhancements[22] It appears that multiple rules processing, which reflects the capacity for rule integration, follows the formation of more basic EF components, typically between ages 5 and 6. It is during this period that transition takes place in the hierarchical structure of rule systems in children
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