Abstract

Based on the dual mechanisms of control (DMC) theory, there are two distinct mechanisms of cognitive control, proactive and reactive control. Importantly, accumulating evidence indicates that there is a developmental shift from predominantly using reactive control to proactive control during childhood, and the engagement of proactive control emerges as early as 5–7 years old. However, less is known about whether and how proactive control at this early age stage is associated with children’s other cognitive abilities such as working memory and math ability. To address this issue, the current study recruited 98 Chinese children under 5–7 years old. Among them, a total of 81 children (mean age = 6.29 years) contributed useable data for the assessments of cognitive control, working memory, and math ability. The results revealed that children at this age period predominantly employed a pattern of proactive control during an AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT). Moreover, the proactive control index estimated by this task was positively associated with both working memory and math performance. Further regression analysis showed that proactive control accounted for significant additional variance in predicting math performance after controlling for working memory. Most interestingly, mediation analysis showed that proactive control significantly mediated the association between working memory and math performance. This suggests that as working memory increases so does proactive control, which may in turn improve math ability in early childhood. Our findings may have important implications for educational practice.

Highlights

  • Cognitive control, the ability to regulate and coordinate goal-directed behavior so as to allow for flexible adaptation to changing environments, has been considered as one of the most basic cognitive skills in humans (Miller and Cohen, 2001)

  • Based on the literature mentioned above, the present study aimed to investigate the relationships of proactive control with both working memory and math ability in early childhood

  • Considering that working memory, which was found significantly correlated with the use of proactive control in the present study, has been convincingly shown to play a critical role in the development of math ability in children (De Smedt et al, 2009; Raghubar et al, 2010), one may wonder whether individual differences in working memory accounts for the relationship between proactive control and math ability

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Summary

Introduction

The ability to regulate and coordinate goal-directed behavior so as to allow for flexible adaptation to changing environments, has been considered as one of the most basic cognitive skills in humans (Miller and Cohen, 2001). Previous research has indicated that cognitive control is involved in a wide range of cognitive activities including learning (Abrahamse et al, 2016), comprehension (Ye and Zhou, 2008), theory of mind (Carlson and Moses, 2001), problem solving (Passolunghi and Siegel, 2001), and general fluid intelligence (Benedek et al, 2014). Proactive Control in Early Childhood a significant amount of variance in academic achievements, above and beyond the effect of general fluid intelligence (Magalhães et al, 2020). Given these critical aspects, the numbers of studies investigating cognitive control have increased dramatically during the past decades. Few research efforts have been dedicated to examine the temporal dynamics of how cognitive control is used

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