2-095 - Thinking beyond the lab: Understanding cognition across contexts can advance the application of developmental research

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

One key challenge for basic research approaches to cognitive development is to understand how behavior in the lab is connected to behavior in real-world settings. For example, how are lab-based assessments of attention connected to children’s attention in the classroom or to their peers on the playground? Similarly, what aspects of a child’s experience in one context influence how they think in another context? Answering these questions is critical for implementing successful interventions that positively impact a child’s cognitive development. Too often, interventions fail because we know little about how training aspects of how children think in one context should be related to thinking in another context. This symposium brings together four papers that describe innovative approaches to investigating how cognition is connected across contexts.

Paper one presents two studies that showcase how working memory may appear different across contexts and development due to differences in how the tasks interface with cognition and behavior. Paper two shows how children’s prior social experiences change their capacity to delay gratification. Paper three shows that children’s performance in a canonical probe of executive function can be enhanced through experience with a feature dimension (e.g., color) in a memory task. Paper four illustrates how classroom outcomes are connected to various aspects of children’s sustained attention measured in a laboratory task. These papers provide new avenues to understanding how children’s thinking is connected across contexts and promise to foster or capacity as researchers to positively impact development outside of the lab.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Sammy Perone, Univ of Minnesota

Individual Presentations

• Effects of task context can shed light onto cognitive self-organization: Taking a dynamic view of visual memory development - Presenting Author: Vanessa R. Simmering, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Preschoolers are less willing to delay gratification in an untrustworthy social context - Presenting Author: Laura Elizabeth Michaelson, University of Colorado, Boulder; Yuko Munakata, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Fostering executive functions across contexts - Presenting Author: Sammy Perone, Univ of Minnesota; Megan Galligan Lorenz, University of Iowa; John P Spencer, University of Iowa; Larissa K Samuelson, University of Iowa

• Different mechanisms for regulating sustained attention and learning in children - Presenting Author: Lucy Claire Erickson, Carnegie Mellon University; Karrie Elizabeth Godwin, Carnegie Mellon University; John Paul Dickerson, Carnegie Mellon University; Erik Daniel Thiessen, Carnegie Mellon University; Anna V Fisher, Carnegie Mellon University