Longitudinal Study of the Development of Higher Mental Functions in Primary School Children

Abstract

This article presents the results of a longitudinal population-based neuropsychological study of the development of higher mental functions (HMFs) in primary school children from grades 1 through 3 at a Moscow public school (n = 84). We monitored changes in HMFs in the total sample and in groups of children with different baseline HMFs (high, medium, low), as measured in the first grade, using seven indexes that reflect individual HMF components such as executive functions (voluntary regulation of activity), serial organization of movements and actions, processing of kinesthetic, auditory, visual, and visual-spatial information, and regulation of activation, at three time points (first, second, and third grades). The study found a generally positive trend in the structural and functional components of HMFs in the children who were tested. Groups of children with different baseline levels of HMFs steadily maintained their differences in the degree of development of the HMFs at each evaluation time point, although the greatest change in HMF components was found in children with initially low scores, and the least change was in children with initially high HMF scores. Among the components with the least change was voluntary regulation—that is, the programming, regulation, and control of one's activity. The fact that children with high baseline functioning did not change significantly in a given function from first to third grades may be related to a decline in learning motivation, insofar as their learning is then occurring in the zone of actual and not proximal development.