Poster #130 - The Role of Executive Functions in Young Children’s Lie-telling and Lie Maintenance

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Lie-telling emerges as young as two or three years of age (Evans & Lee, 2011), with the ability to lie effectively increasing throughout childhood. This developmental increase in lie-telling has been found to be related to executive functioning (EF) development (Talwar & Lee, 2008). To tell a lie, EF skills such as inhibitory control, working memory, and planning are required to inhibit the truth and construct an alternative plausible response (Walczyk et al., 2003). Only a few studies have explored the relation between EF and young children’s initial lies (Leduc et al., 2017; Williams et al., 2017), but no study to date has uncovered a relation between children’s ability to maintain a lie and all three proposed EF skills (working memory, inhibitory control, and planning). The goal of the present study was to examine the relation between young children’s initial lies, lie maintenance, and EF development. To address limitations of previous studies, multiple tasks were administered for each EF skill.

Procedure. Young children (3-4 year olds; N = 93) participated in the temptation-resistance paradigm where they had an opportunity to peek at a forbidden toy when left alone in a room. When the experimenter returned, she asked children if they peeked (measure of initial lie) and what they thought the toy was (measure of lie maintenance). Children completed a battery of EF tasks (working memory: digit span, six box scramble; inhibitory control: day/night, bear/dragon; planning: Tower of London).

Results. As age increased, children were more likely to lie (𝜒 2 = 13.22, p <.001). Inhibitory control (specifically the bear/dragon task), was the only significant predictor of children’s initial lie-telling, B = .505, Wald = 6.84, p = .009, OR = 1.66, such that for every point increase on the bear/dragon task children were 1.66 times more likely to lie. In terms of lie-maintenance, the Tower of London and day/night tasks were significant predictors (𝜒 2 = 16.11, p = .001). Specifically, children were significantly more likely to maintain their lie with longer planning times on the Tower of London patterns (indication of superior planning), B = .052, Wald = 6.53, p = .011, OR = 1.05, and increased day/night inhibitory control scores, B = .316, Wald = 6.22, p = .013, OR = 1.37. In contrast, children who required more moves to complete Tower of London (indication of poorer planning) were less likely to maintain their lie, B = -.275, Wald = 5.95, p = .015, OR = 1.32.

These results demonstrate that the relation between inhibitory control and lie-telling may be task-specific (bear/dragon: a delay inhibition task is related to initial lie-telling vs. day/night: a conflict inhibition task is related to lie maintenance). Further, this study provides a novel account of the relation between young children’s planning and lie maintenance, demonstrating that even young children require planning skills to tell more sophisticated lies.

Authors

• Alison M O'Connor, Brock University
  Presenting Author

• Victoria W Dykstra, Brock University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Angela D Evans, Brock University
  Non-Presenting Author