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Young children's ability to act deliberately in light of their knowledge is obviously limited. During the 1st few years of life, however, children change from relatively helpless creatures who must rely on their caregivers to fulfill even their most basic needs into complex intellectual and emotional beings who are able to consider alternative perspectives on a situation, plan ahead, and act in a conscious, goal-directed fashion. These changes in children's behavior are studied under the rubric of executive function (EF). EF is an umbrella term for a number of subfunctions, including, but not limited to, working memory, inhibitory control, and task-switching (Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000).Traditionally, research on the development of EF has focused on its relatively cool, cognitive aspects, often associated with lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and elicited by relatively abstract, decontextualized tasks. One such task is the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS; Frye, Zelazo, & We thank the editors for their helpful comments on a draft of this chapter.

This study examined the relative efficacy of explicit instruction and indirect priming on young children's behavior in a task that required a series of choices between a small immediate reward and a larger delayed reward. One hundread and six 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions involving one of two goals (maximize rewards or obtain immediate rewards) and one of two types of instruction (indirect priming using stories or explicit verbal instructions). Children were more likely to make goal-congruent choices as a result of indirect priming, but there was no effect of explicit instruction, suggesting that indirect approaches to changing young children's behavior may be more effective than direct approaches under some circumstances. These results have implications for understanding the dynamic interplay between bottom-up and top-down influences on self-regulation early in development.

The weak axiom of revealed preferences suggests that the value of an object can be understood through the simple examination of choices. Although this axiom has driven economic theory, the assumption of equation between value and choice is often violated. fMRI was used to decouple the processes associated with evaluating stimuli from evaluating one's actions. Whereas activity in left posterior areas of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was associated with processing the objective value of stimuli, activity in medial anterior areas of the OFC was associated with accepting high value gambles and rejecting low value gambles; that is, making correct decisions. These data demonstrate that distinct areas of the OFC provide dissociated representations for use in adaptive decision-making and suggest an important processing distinction between the concepts of good/bad and right/wrong.

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