1-053 - An integrative approach to understanding executive function development in young children.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Executive functions (EFs) refer to a complex set of skills that involve processing and manipulating information, inhibiting automatic and inappropriate responses to environmental stimuli, and directing attention to appropriate tasks (Morrison et al., 2010).

Early EF development has become a focal point of research given its relevance for school readiness and academic outcomes. The study of EF development has drawn the interest of scientists from different disciplines, yielding a diverse set of findings, that each contribute to our understanding of the nature, sources and growth of these foundational skills, and reflect the different techniques, tools, and measurement traditions specific to the academic discipline from which they are drawn. As this research base grows, it has become increasingly important to understand the degree to which research from distinct disciplines inform one another and the extent to which findings from different fields converge on our understanding of early cognitive processes.

This symposium will focus on three studies that employ methods from educational psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience to understand the development of EF in young children, and address the following questions: 1) to what degree does our understanding of EF development rely on field-specific methodological approaches and theoretical conceptualizations? 2) how can researchers across academic discipline contribute toward a comprehensive understanding of EF development? The first presentation will explore infant neural predictors of preschool EF. Next, the structure of EF will be examined using a diverse set of tasks. Finally, the role of teacher-child relationships for children’s EF growth will be explored.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chair

• Frederick J Morrison, University of Michigan

Discussant

• Jennie Grammer, UCLA

Individual Presentations

• Infant neural and behavioral predictors of preschool executive function. - Presenting Author: Alleyne Broomell, Virginia Tech; Non-Presenting Author: Martha Ann Bell, Virginia Tech

• The structure of executive function in early childhood: Evidence from individual and group-based assessments and teacher reports. - Presenting Author: Sammy Ahmed, University of Michigan; Non-Presenting Author: Frederick J Morrison, University of Michigan

• The importance of the teacher-child relationship for teachers’ perceptions of students’ executive functions. - Presenting Author: Jenna E. Finch, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Non-Presenting Author: Jelena Obradovic, Stanford University; Non-Presenting Author: Elisa B Garcia, SRI International