Poster #41 - Voluntary task switching in children: Switching more to reduce the cost of task selection

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Emerging cognitive control supports increasingly efficient goal-directed behaviours and predicts later life outcomes. Recent research has shown that the ability to select the relevant tasks to perform is key to efficient cognitive control and its development across childhood. With age, children are increasingly expected to decide autonomously which goals to attain. However, little is known about how they engage control in such a self-directed fashion, with little external aid. This study examined self-directed control development by adapting the voluntary task switching (VTS) paradigm—the gold standard measure of this control form in adults—for use with 5-6 year-old and 9-10 year-old children and comparison with young adults. In this task, participants were asked to sort toys (i.e., the targets) according to their shape or colour into the Santa’s Shape bag and Colour bag. To match with the instructions of performing the tasks (i) equally often and (ii) in a random fashion as in the adult version, participants received child-friendly instructions to fill the bags (i) with the same number of toys and (ii) in a non-predictive manner to make sure that a ‘bad elf’ could not steal the toys (Figure 1). The latter aimed to ensure that participants decided on their own which task to perform on each trial, rather than following a simple strategy (e.g., strict alternation between the bags). As such, if participants used a predictive strategy for a fixed number of trials, the bad elf appeared and stole the toy to remind them not to be predictive. Contrary to previous VTS studies that have mainly focused on task transition via the probability of switch, noted p(switch), two more indices were used to assess task selection processes, hence better capturing VTS performance. These indices were task selection equality (i.e., the ability to perform each task equally often) and task randomness, (i.e., the occurrences of the bad elf which indicated the use of systematic strategies). Moreover, participants performed two versions of this task, varying in the amount of time preparation available between the response and the stimulus, either 600 ms (short condition) or 2,000 ms (long condition). This allowed for the examination of the use of proactive control in self-directed situations. Results indicated that younger children seemingly performed the task successfully, displaying a p(switch) similar to older children and young adults. Importantly, p(switch) were lower in the short time preparation condition for all participants, indicating that proactive control plays a key role when it comes to decide between repeating trials or switching trials. However, younger children struggled more than older children and young adults with task selection. Indeed, they were less likely to perform the two tasks equally often, and they relied more on systematic strategies to reduce the cost of task selection, even if the strategy involved switching more often (Figure 2). Like externally driven control, self-directed control relies critically on task selection processes, suggesting that these two forms of control form a continuum rather than two discrete categories.

Authors

• Aurélien Stéphane Alexandre Frick, University of Edinburgh
  Presenting Author

• Maria Antonella Brandimonte, Suor Orsola Benincasa University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicolas Chevalier, University of Edinburgh
  Non-Presenting Author