Wait! Does Imposing Delays Improve Children's Inhibitory Control?

• In Event: Enhance cognitive functions across development: factors, strategies or interventions

Abstract

Children often behave impulsively—darting into the street after a ball, taking a toy from their sibling without asking, or grabbing a hot cookie from the kitchen counter. The ability to control these impulsive thoughts and actions, known as inhibitory control, is a critical skill with life-long implications. Inhibitory control in childhood predicts later life outcomes including health, wealth, and academic performance (Blair & Raver, 2015; Blair & Razza, 2007; Moffitt et al., 2011; St Clair-Thompson & Gathercole, 2006). The importance of inhibitory control in the moment and longer term make it a high-interest target for interventions. Imposing a delay before a child can act appears to support inhibitory control (Diamond, Kirkham, & Amso, 2002; Simpson et al., 2012; Beck, Carroll, Brunsdon, & Gryg, 2011). However, some prior studies that imposed delays included reminders about what children should be doing. These reminders make it difficult to determine whether delays alone benefit inhibitory control. Attempts to isolate the effects of delays have yielded mixed results. Delays alone did not did not improve 3.0-4.0 year-olds’ inhibitory control in a go/no-go box-search task (Barker & Munakata, 2015), in which children are are taught to find stickers by opening boxes with a ‘go’ cue and not opening boxes with a ‘no-go’ cue. Delays alone appeared to improve 3.75-5.0 year-olds’ inhibitory control in a Day-Night Stroop task (Ling et al., 2016), in which children were asked to say “day” when shown a picture of a moon and “night” when shown a picture of a sun. However, delays imposed during the Day-Night Stroop included a positive message (the experimenter sang, "I hope you have a nice time; I like you"). This positive message may have encouraged and motivated children to engage inhibitory control when it was needed, making it unclear if delays alone are effective. To inform theory and intervention, the current study tested whether delays improve childrens’ inhibitory control when isolated from positive messages. Sixty-eight 3.5-5.0 year-old children were tested on the Day-Night Stroop task with a neutral content delay (the experimenter sang, “la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la’') imposed either just before they responded or between trials (i.e., no delay imposed on response). Children who received a neutral delay just before they could act performed significantly better (85% accuracy) than children in the control group (73% accuracy, F(1,66) = 6.071, η2 = 0.084 , p = .016). These findings indicate that delays alone can benefit children’s inhibitory control. Why does the passage of time improve children’s performance on some inhibitory control tasks (such as Day-Night Stroop) but not others (such as box-search)? The benefits of delays may depend on a child’s age, the complexity of a task, and the visibility of impulse-inducing targets. We propose ways to test such possibilities and discuss implications for theories of inhibitory control, executive function more generally, and interventions.

Authors

• Jade Yonehiro, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Jane Barker, University of Colorado Boulder
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne H. Roche, Johns Hopkins University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yuko Munakata, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author