Abstract
A key developmental transition in executive function is in the temporal dynamics of its engagement: children shift from reactively calling to mind task-relevant information as needed, to being able to proactively maintain information across time in anticipation of upcoming demands. This transition is important for understanding individual differences and developmental changes in executive function; however, methods targeting its assessment are limited. We tested the possibility that Track-It, a paradigm developed to measure selective sustained attention, also indexes proactive control. In this task children must track a target shape as it moves unpredictably among moving distractors, and identify where it disappears, which may require proactively maintaining information about the target or goal. In two experiments (5–6 year-olds, Ns = 33, 64), children's performance on Track-It predicted proactive control across two established paradigms. These findings suggest Track-It measures proactive control in children. Theoretical possibilities regarding how proactive control and selective sustained attention may be related are also discussed.
Highlights
Proactive control in the cued task-switching paradigm was indexed via reaction times [20], and Track-It performance was indexed using the standard measure from this task of percent of trials on which children accurately identified the location of the target’s disappearance [27]
We generated two measures of proactive control on AX Continuous Performance task (AX-CPT), based on accuracy and reaction time, that have been used in prior work [18, 21]
Across two experiments involving two separate established measures of proactive control, accuracy on Track-It significantly predicted performance, controlling for age and other task factors. These relationships are unlikely to reflect other factors such as alertness or motivation, which could lead some children to perform better across these tasks as well as any others. Such factors would be expected to improve performance across all trials and conditions, whereas the patterns we found were specific to profiles of proactive control, and these patterns held when controlling for other possible individual differences
Summary
Whether refraining from eating a sugary treat while on a diet, staying alert during a long meeting, or switching between tasks to meet deadlines, we draw on control to achieve our goals. This skill, termed executive function (EF), improves dramatically in childhood [1,2,3] and predicts success in key domains of human functioning (e.g., academic, health, and wealth; [4, 5]). Children use increasingly abstract representations to support EF [9, 10, 2], and EF skills may become increasingly differentiated in the course of development [11,12,13,14]
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