Executive Function Development

Abstract

Executive function developmentCitation for published version: Chevalier, N 2015, 'Executive function development: Making sense of the environment to behave adaptively' Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 24, no. 5, General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Cognitive Offloading: Structuring the Environment to Improve Children's Working Memory Task Performance

“…In contrast, children in the high working memory group rated the ordered condition as easier than the random condition, although they still did not choose an ordered arrangement in the free condition. Children in this group may therefore be showing an awareness of task difficulty (Efklides et al, 2006), but lack the ability to use appropriate strategies to support performance (Chevalier, 2015(Chevalier, , 2017.…”

“…However, as the results of our metacognitive questions demonstrated, it would not necessarily be sufficient to ensure that the task environment had been adapted appropriately. Children would also need to be aware of such changes, and of the benefits they might afford (Chevalier, 2015;Schneider, 2008). However, before firm conclusions are drawn relating to the application to classroom contexts, it would be useful to investigate whether this pattern of results replicates in a more naturalistic setting using meaningful objects, and in tasks that are more closely analogous to learning activities typically encountered in the classroom.…”

“…As such, we expected that children in this experiment would recognize that an ordered arrangement facilitates better performance. However, the ability to anticipate task difficulty, and then plan an effective strategy to improve performance (proactive control), is less well developed in younger children and is likely influenced by concurrent developments in working memory (Chevalier, 2015). Therefore, it could be that children may not choose an ordered arrangement in the free arrangement condition, even if they can retrospectively judge the ordered condition as easier.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, no studies to date have investigated the effect of cognitive offloading in children. Given that skills related to offloading, such as goal setting, information processing, and use of control strategies, develop over the early and middle-school years (Anderson, 2002;Chevalier, 2015;Davidson, Amso, Anderson, & Diamond, 2006), it is important to investigate offloading in child populations, rather than making assumptions based on the adult literature. Indeed, in their review paper, Risko and Gilbert (2016) state that understanding how cognitive offloading behavior emerges over childhood is one of the key, as yet unanswered, research questions in this field.…”

Latent Factors in Attention Emerge from 9 Years of Age among Elementary School Children

“…It is not strange that some studies could explain our results from the perspective of working memory. Developmental studies have shown adults’ working memory capacity tends to be larger and their executive function is better than children’s (Chevalier, 2015; Tsubomi and Watanabe, 2017). Given that a number of the attention tasks required the use of both working memory and executive function, it would naturally be easier for adults to complete them.…”