No abstract

Naturalistic goal-directed behaviours require the engagement and maintenance of appropriate levels of cognitive control over relatively extended intervals of time. In two experiments, we examined preschool children's abilities to maintain top-down control throughout the course of a sequential task. Both 3- and 5-year-olds demonstrated good abilities to access goals at the lowest level of the representational hierarchy. However, only 5-year-olds consistently aligned their response choices with goals at superordinate levels. These findings suggest that the ability to maintain top-down control and adjust behavioural responses according to goals at multiple levels of abstraction undergoes a marked improvement throughout the preschool period. Results are discussed in relation to current accounts of cognitive control and the monitoring of conflict in sequential action.

No abstract

One strategy that can be used to achieve a distant goal is to update into WM only items relevant to the goal, eliminating irrelevant items as distraction. This is called selective input gating (e.g., O'Reilly & Frank, 2006). A second strategy is to accumulate all information and to select, from the now cumulative contents of WM, only items relevant to one's goal. This is called output gating (e.g., Chatham et al., 2014). Output gating as a control strategy places more demands on WM memory (more items actively maintained at once) and attentional selection (more distractors from which to choose the target goal response). Here, we examine the development of both WM updating strategies in 3-to 7-year-old children, and whether one strategy is more commonly used to guide goal-oriented action. Few studies have examined how the temporal dynamics of goal setting impact children's performance on cognitive control