Poster #9 - Assessing Inhibitory Control in Kindergarten Children: Validity of Integrating Response Accuracy and Response Latency

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

Inhibitory control is a crucial element of human cognition and behavior with important correlates in the areas of academic success, health behavior and outcomes, and the development of socio-emotional competencies. Inhibitory control develops quickly from 3 to 6 years. Due to its rapid and nonlinear development, challenges arise in assessing inhibitory control consistently over a broader age range of young children. An essential aspect is how response accuracy and latency should be used for assessing inhibitory control. The present study examined the validity of a model-based approach to integrate two metrics through a bifactor-like model (Magnus et al., 2019). In this approach, item level response accuracies and latencies are combined to predict an inhibitory control score which led to a more precise measurement compared to only using response accuracy. In our sample of 271 children completed a computerized Stroop task. Integrating response accuracy and latency slightly improved measurement precision. However, multigroup analyses with younger and older children (cut-off 48 months) revealed that the relationship between response accuracy and latency was not consistent across the two age groups. A time-on-task analysis using the generalized linear mixed modeling approach (cf. Goldhammer et al., 2014) revealed that as children’s inhibitory control ability improved over time, they were able to complete the task accurately and fast. Less-skilled children, in contrast, performed better in terms of accuracy when they invested more time in completing the task, suggesting that these children relied more on controlled processing for response inhibition. These findings suggest that integrating response accuracy and latency into a single score may be problematic in developmental studies with kindergarten children. Researchers should consider both response accuracy and latency in the assessment of inhibitory control but treat them as separate measures that can each contribute information to the diagnosis of a child’s inhibitory control ability.

Authors

• Daniel Schulz, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
  Presenting Author

• Wolfgang Lenhard, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

• Madlen Mangold, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

• Julia Schindler, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

• Robin Klaus Segerer, University of Basel

• Tobias Richter, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg