1-109 - Executive functioning in emotional, motivational and social contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Progress in executive functioning—the goal-directed regulation of thoughts and actions—during childhood supports greater autonomy as well as increasingly complex and adaptive behaviour with age. The neurocognitive processes underpinning this progress have attracted exponential scientific interest over the past decades, as childhood executive functioning is a key predictor of life success, while poor executive functioning is a major risk factor for academic failure and cascading negative outcomes. In everyday life, children often engage executive function processes in emotionally, motivationally, and socially relevant contexts. For instance, they may need to concentrate and gather their thoughts during a stressful school exam, learn how to play a music instrument in a ludic environment, or be promised a reward for behaving during a family meal. Similarly, in the laboratory, children’s executive functioning is often assessed in situations involving social interactions as well as engaging stimuli and reward to keep children motivated and on task. Further, as experimental tasks are often computerized, performance may vary with exposure to new technologies. Yet, the exact influences of emotional, motivational, and social factors as well as exposure to new technologies on children’s executive functioning are still largely unknown and remain to be disentangled from one another. This symposium gathers contributions using behaviour, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and electroencephalography to tease apart these specific influences on the neurocognitive processes underlying executive functioning in preschool and school-age children. This line of research has clear implications for supporting executive functioning “in the wild” and improving assessment in the laboratory.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chairs

• Nicolas Chevalier, University of Edinburgh

• Yusuke Moriguchi, Kyoto University

Individual Presentations

• The influence of positive emotion and reward motivation on children’s cognitive control - Presenting Author: Xiaoyu Jin, University of Edinburgh; Non-Presenting Author: Nicolas Chevalier, University of Edinburgh

• The effects of emotion on children’s attention: Insights from electroencephalography - Presenting Author: Aishah Abdul Rahman, University of Alberta; Non-Presenting Author: Jonah Elke, University of Alberta; Non-Presenting Author: Sandra Wiebe, University of Alberta

• Neural features of social and non-social reward on executive function in preschoolers - Presenting Author: Yusuke Moriguchi, Kyoto University; Non-Presenting Author: Kanda Lertladaluck, Mahidol university

• The Impact of Smartphone Exposure on Executive Attention during Early Childhood - Presenting Author: Hwajin Yang, Singapore Management University; Non-Presenting Author: Wee Qin Ng, Singapore Management University; Non-Presenting Author: Andree Hartanto, Singapore Management University; Non-Presenting Author: Sujin Yang, Ewha Womans University