Poster #7 - A cross-cultural analysis of the development of executive function during late childhood

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Objectives: Most empirical studies of executive function (EF) have focused heavily on preschoolers. To test the methodological and developmental generalizability of existing work on East-West contrasts in EF beyond early childhood, this cross-cultural study presented a computerized battery of EF tasks to a large sample of 9- to 12-year-olds. Building on report of a two-year lag in performance on computerized EF tasks among school-aged children in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom (Ellefson, Ng, Wang, & Hughes, 2016), this study included children living in a traditional community from Mainland China (where exposure to digital media is much more limited than in either Hong Kong or the United Kingdom). We therefore aimed to apply multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to examine whether a computerized battery of EF tasks would exhibit the same measurement properties (e.g., equal factor form, equal factor loading and equal scalar invariance) when administered in different languages with different cultural groups. Another primary aim of this study was to examine two competing hypotheses. The first, based on the potential importance of individualist versus collectivist cultural distinction (e.g., Wang, Devine, Wong, & Hughes, 2016), was that Chinese children would possess superior EF skills relative to their British counterparts. The second, based on the potential importance of familiarity with computer-based activities, was that children from Mainland China would lag behind the Hong Kong and U.K. groups on online EF tests.
Methods and Results: In whole-class sessions, 500 children from Mainland China, 371 children from Hong Kong and 453 children from the United Kingdom, split equally by gender and across three different school years 5, 6 and 7, completed a 35-minute online EF battery that provided measures of working memory, inhibition, shifting and planning. This online platform of EF tasks assessed both accuracy and response time (Ellefson et al., 2016), enabling the efficiency scores for each task to be calculated as:
Efficiency = Total Number of Correct Trials/Mean Response Time to Correct Trials
Key results were that (i) all 4 indicators loaded onto a single latent factor; (ii) this latent factor explained significant variance in each group and exhibited measurement invariance; (iii) children growing up in Hong Kong outperformed their peers from the other two cultural groups, with a large effect for the contrast with the U.K. sample and a small effect for the contrast with the Mainland Chinese sample; and (iv) controlling for the influences of general cognitive ability, age, pedagogical experience and self-regulated learning, individual differences in screen time were not related to EF performance.
Conclusion: Our findings support the feasibility and validity of administering computerized EF tasks to children from different cultures. Asian children’s advantage in EF skills appears to persist into preadolescence, and this advantage is unlikely to be due solely to modality or contrasts in access to computers. We propose that this study will be a considerable expansion in the methodological and conceptual scope of existing literature.

Authors

• Chengyi Xu, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Michelle Ellefson, University of Cambridge
  Non-Presenting Author

• Claire Hughes, University of Cambridge
  Non-Presenting Author