This study explores the extent to which a bilingual advantage can be observed for three tasks in an established population of fully fluent bilinguals from childhood through adulthood. Welsh-English ...simultaneous and early sequential bilinguals, as well as English monolinguals, aged 3 years through older adults, were tested on three sets of cognitive and executive function tasks. Bilinguals were Welsh-dominant, balanced, or English-dominant, with only Welsh, Welsh and English, or only English at home. Card sorting, Simon, and a metalinguistic judgment task (650, 557, and 354 participants, respectively) reveal little support for a bilingual advantage, either in relation to control or globally. Primarily there is no difference in performance across groups, but there is occasionally better performance by monolinguals or persons dominant in the language being tested, and in one case-in one condition and in one age group-lower performance by the monolinguals. The lack of evidence for a bilingual advantage in these simultaneous and early sequential bilinguals suggests the need for much closer scrutiny of what type of bilingual might demonstrate the reported effects, under what conditions, and why.
That conditional, if-then reasoning does not emerge until 4-5 years has long been accepted. Here we show that children barely 3 years old can do conditional reasoning. All that was needed was a ...superficial change to the stimuli: When color was a property of the shapes (line drawings of a star and truck) rather than of the background (as in all past conditional discrimination CD testing), 3-year-olds could succeed. Three-year-olds do not seem to use color to inform them which shape is correct unless color is a property of the shapes themselves. While CD requires integrating color and shape information, the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task requires keeping those dimension cognitively separate - inhibiting attention to one (e.g., shape) when sorting by the other (e.g., color). For DCCS, a superficial change to the stimuli that is the inverse of what helps on CD enables 3-year-olds to succeed when normally they do not until
years. As we and others have previously shown, 3-year-olds can succeed at DCCS when color is a property of the background (e.g., a white truck on a red background), instead of a property of the stimulus (e.g., a red truck on a white background, as in standard DCCS). Our findings on CD and DCCS suggest that scaffolding preschoolers' emerging conceptual skills by changing the way stimuli look (perceptual bootstrapping) enables 3-year-olds to demonstrate reasoning abilities long thought beyond their grasp. Evidently, children of 3 years have difficulty mentally separating dimensions (e.g., color and shape) of the same object and difficulty mentally integrating dimensions not part of the same object. Our present CD findings plus our earlier DCCS findings provide strong evidence against prominent cognitive complexity, conditional reasoning, and graded memory theories for why 3-year-olds fail these two tasks. The ways we have traditionally queried children may have obscured the budding reasoning competencies present at 3 years of age.
•Effects of dual-language input on bilingual children’s EF skills were examined.•Children’s shifting, inhibition, and monitoring skills were tested.•Language ability was found to moderate the effects ...of dual language exposure on EF.•Dual-language input was associated with better EF for children with better language.•Language ability thresholds graded effects of dual-language input on EF.
The current study examined the effects of dual language exposure on executive function in 5- to 11-year-old Spanish–English bilingual children with different language skills. Dual language exposure was measured via parent report and was operationalized as the proportion of time spent in an environment where both English and Spanish were present. Executive function was measured via the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task. Shifting costs, switching costs, and mixing costs were derived to index executive function performance. A significant interaction between extent of dual language exposure and language skills was observed such that children showed smaller shifting and mixing costs with increased dual language input as their language skills increased. The results suggest a graded effect of dual language exposure on executive function, where a robust language system may be required for dual language exposure to influence executive function.
•3-year old children have difficulty with rule-switching in the standard card sort.•Children may benefit from multisensory information to encode stimulus features.•Children succeed better at ...rule-switching when sorting 3-D objects than 2-D cards.•A robust multisensory representation of object features enables better performance.•Tangible engagement with 3-D objects affords greater cognitive control.
A three-dimensional object version of the standard Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) was developed to examine the influence of multisensory stimuli on 3-year-old children’s executive function. Whereas the developmental phenomenon marking 3-year-olds’ difficulties with rule use in the standard DCCS can be attributed to several cognitive factors, we examined the possibility that better encoding of object features could facilitate children’s rule-switching behavior. We examined whether 3-year-olds might be able to capitalize on cues available to multiple senses to create a more robust representation of object features that would enable them to overcome previous difficulties with rule switching in the standard DCCS. Participants were randomly assigned to the standard two-dimensional DCCS or the three-dimensional object version that was designed to match the rabbit and boat images used in the card version. The 3-year-olds who completed the object version outperformed those who completed the standard card version, succeeding in switching rules more accurately when provided with visual, auditory–verbal labeling, and tactile information of object features. Notably, more children achieved perfect accuracy and fewer children achieved floor-level performance in the object version than in the card version. We attribute 3-year-olds’ success in the object version to greater cognitive control made possible by the enhanced encoding of the stimulus properties through multisensory input and enhanced cognitive processing of ecologically valid three-dimensional objects.
•We examined the link between stable and flexible attention in preschoolers.•Stable selective attention was measured using the implicit Dimension-Preference task.•Attention switching was measured ...using the Dimension Change-Card Sort task.•Sustaining attention selectively was positively related to attention switching.•Flexible attention may be supported by stable implicit attentional processes.
Stability and flexibility are fundamental to an intelligent cognitive system. Here, we examined the relationship between stability in selective attention and explicit control of flexible attention. Preschoolers were tested on the Dimension Preference (DP) task, which measures the stability of selective attention to an implicitly primed dimension, and the Dimension Change Card Sort (DCCS) task, which measures flexible attention switching between dimensions. Children who successfully switched on the DCCS task were more likely than those who perseverated to sustain attention to the primed dimension on the DP task across trials. We propose that perseverators have less stable attention and distribute their attention between dimensions, whereas switchers can successfully stabilize attention to individual dimensions and, thus, show more enduring priming effects. Flexible attention may emerge, in part, from implicit processes that stabilize attention even in tasks not requiring switching.
This study aims to examine the neural correlates of cognitive shifting during the
task with functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Altogether 49 children completed the
tasks, and 25 children (M
= ...68.66, SD = 5.3) passing all items were classified into the Switch group. Twenty children (M
= 62.05, SD = 8.13) committing more than one perseverative errors were grouped into the Perseverate group. The Switch group had Brodmann Area (BA) 9 and 10 activated in the pre-switch period and BA 6, 9, 10, 40, and 44 in the post-switch period. In contrast, the Perseverate group had BA 9 and 10 activated in the pre-switch period and BA 8, 9, 10 in the post-switch period. The general linear model results afford strong support to the "V-shape curve" hypothesis by identifying a significant decrease-increase cycle in BA 9 and 44, the neural correlations of cognitive shifting.
Recent studies have suggested that dissociable processes featuring distinct types of inhibition support cognitive control in tasks requiring participants to override a prepotent response with a ...control-demanding alternative response. An open question concerns how these processes support cognitive flexibility in rule-switching tasks. We used a technique known as reach tracking to investigate how 5- to 8-year-olds (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) select, maintain, and switch between incompatible rule sets in a computerized version of the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS). Our results indicate that rule switching differentially impacts two key processes underlying cognitive control in children and adults. Adult performance also revealed a strong response bias not observed in children, which complicated a direct comparison of switching between the age groups and reopens questions concerning the relation between child and adult performance on the task. We discuss these findings in the context of a contemporary model of cognitive control.
General linear modeling (GLM) has been widely employed to estimate the hemodynamic changes observed by functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology, which are found to be nonlinear rather ...than linear, however. Therefore, GLM might not be appropriate for modeling the hemodynamic changes evoked by cognitive processing in developmental neurocognitive studies. There is an urgent need to identify a better statistical model to fit into the nonlinear fNIRS data. This study addressed this need by developing a quadratic equation model to reanalyze the existing fNIRS data (N = 38, Mage = 5.0 years, SD = 0.69 years, 17 girls) collected from the mixed-order design Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task and verified the model with a new set of data with the Habit-DisHabit design. First, comparing the quadratic and cubic modeling results of the mixed-order design data indicated that the proposed quadratic equation was better than GLM and cubic regression to model the oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) changes in this task. Second, applying this quadratic model with the Habit-DisHabit design data verified its suitability and indicated that the new design was more effective in identifying the neural correlates of cognitive shifting than the mixed-order design. These findings jointly indicate that Habit-DisHabit Design with a quadratic equation might better model the hemodynamic changes in preschoolers during the DCCS task.
•We explored cognitive flexibility in typical 6–10-year-olds and adults.•We used a modified Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST).•Performance continued to improve until age 10.•Improvements were ...related to developing working memory.
We explored the development of cognitive flexibility in typically developing 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds and adults by modifying a common cognitive flexibility task, the Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST). Although performance on the standard FIST reached ceiling by 8years, FIST performance on other variations continued to improve until 10years of age. Within a detailed task analysis, we also explored working memory storage and processing components of executive function and how these contribute to the development of cognitive flexibility. The findings reinforce the notion that cognitive flexibility is a multifaceted construct but that the development of working memory contributes in part to age-related change in this ability.
We examined the influence of bilingualism on task switching by inspecting various markers for task-switching costs. English monolinguals and Korean–English bilinguals completed a modified Dimensional ...Change Card Sort task based on a nonverbal task-switching paradigm. We found advantages for Korean–English bilinguals in terms of smaller single-task (pure-block) switch costs and greater reactivation benefits than those of English monolinguals. However, bilingual advantages in mixing costs were relatively weak, and the two groups did not differ on local switch costs. Notably, when we approximated the cue-based priming effect in single-task (pure) blocks, we found no evidence that the locus of bilingual advantages in task-switching performance is attributable to a basic cue-priming effect. Taken together, our results suggest that bilingualism is conducive to task switching via facilitation in control processing, including inhibition of proactive interferences and efficient adaptation to abstract task-set reactivation.
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