A New Stroop Task to Assess Inhibitory Control and Cognitive Flexibility in Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

Inhibitory control, a central component of young children’s executive functions, is classically measured using the Day/Night Stroop Task (Gerstadt et al., 1994). Different paradigms were developed to control for ceiling effects (Lagattuta et al., 2011). We developed/evaluated a new Stroop paradigm that not only limits ceiling effects but also assesses cognitive flexibility.

METHODS
Participants
251 children (17 three-, 104 four-, 100 five, and 30 six-year-olds; 50% Male/Female) who attended five diverse preschools/schools in an urban city, Southeastern U.S. Of 159 families who completed demographic questionnaires, approximately 50% reported speaking a different home language; 22% indicated “White,” 36% “Black,” 24% “Hispanic,” 16% “Asian,” 3% “Multiracial.” Family SES ranged from $20,000/year to $200,000+/year.

Procedure
The newly-developed Day/Night Stroop Task had four trials of 10 stimuli and differed from previous research in several ways:

1) Children completed practice trials until they performed two trials successfully. Thus, our definition of standardization was all children demonstrated proficiency before proceeding to standardized, scored trials for both the “regular”(“day” for sun; “night” for moon) and “silly” (“night” for sun; “day” for moon) trials. Trials following training were standardized with no feedback.

2) Baseline performance was assessed by beginning with a “regular” trial of 10 items. This differed from previous research and served as baseline data.

3) Next, practice of inhibition trials (“silly trials”) ensured children understood those directions.

4) After two “silly” trials of 10 stimuli, children returned to the “regular” way. The regular way did not require inhibition, because it was the typical way to process the stimuli. It required cognitive flexibility, because it involved returning to the original way. This measure enabled us to assess cognitive flexibility for 3-6-year-old children.

Results
A 4X4 Repeated-measures ANOVA was computed on the number of errors for each trial with age as the between-subjects factor and trial as the within-subjects factor. There was a significant main effect age, F(3, 247) = 8.87, p<.001; and a significant age by trial interaction, F(3, 247) = 4.28, p=.006.

Figure 1 displays the results with 95% confidence intervals. All children committed significantly more errors when changing from the initial “regular” trial to the first “silly” trial. Whereas 3-year-olds continued to commit errors for the 2nd silly trial, the 4-6-year-olds improved their performance (with more improvement by age). In addition, 3- and 4-year-olds committed more errors than baseline when returning to the “regular” way, which suggested issues with cognitive flexibility as well as inhibition. However, the 5-6-year-olds improved when going back to the regular way, and their performance either was close to baseline (5’s) or better than baseline (6’s) overall.

The results for the time to read the words also had significant effects of age and trial (both p<.001), but not a significant interaction between age and time. Overall children improved their time from trial to trial, though older children were faster than younger children for every trial (see Figure 2).The results of this Day/Night Stroop Task revealed separate estimates of young children’s executive functions of inhibition and flexibility using a single task.

Authors

• Darlene DeMarie, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer A Bugos, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author