You are here! Rethinking children's executive function development in the presence of others

Abstract

The development of executive function (EF) has been linked to various life outcomes, motivating intense research on the topic. While much of this research has focused on more thoroughly understanding age‐related changes of the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms involved, recent theoretical and empirical works have stressed how the immediate physical and social context plays an important role in how children engage in control. Recent studies have shown that the experimenter is an important variable modulating how children engage EF. In this article, I argue that this social presence should be examined more thoroughly to understand the influence of the research context on assessing EF in children. However, this examination should not neglect the fact that the presence of others and the interactions with them likely shape the development of EF in the long run, with important interindividual differences. Examining how others affect children's development of EF can have important implications, such as better reproducibility of studies' findings and theoretical conceptions.