Executive function speed and accuracy: Associations with children’s academic skills in Ghana

• In Event: Executive functions across diverse contexts

Abstract

Executive functions (EFs) represent a set of higher-order cognitive processes that support goal-directed behavior (Diamond, 2013). EFs are culturally universal skills that have positive associations with academic outcomes in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs; Obradović & Willoughby, 2019). Yet most of the research on EF measurement and its contribution to academic skills in LMICs has been conducted in early childhood. There is limited consensus on the best way to measure EF skills during middle childhood, when children’s accuracy on EF tasks reaches ceiling levels (Camerota et al., 2019; Zelazo et al., 2016). As tablet-based tasks are becoming more common, researchers can use response time (RT) data to supplement accuracy when measuring EFs. Faster RT is believed to index better EF (Willoughby et al., 2018). The change in RT between EF and on-EF tasks (ΔRT) has similarly been used to measure EFs in HICs. Low ΔRT is believed to index better EF because participants don’t need to slow down as much when responding to the higher cognitive demands of the EF task. Camerota et al. (2019) examined interactions between accuracy and ΔRT, demonstrating that ΔRT was more predictive of academic skills for U.S. first graders with high accuracy than with low accuracy. To extend this research on EF RT measurement to LMIC settings, we adopted a similar analysis approach in a Ghanaian middle-childhood sample.
We tested direct and interactive effects of accuracy and ΔRT for academic outcomes in Ghana (N = 362) using the same tablet-based EF task (Hearts and Flowers; Davidson et al., 2006) used by Camerota et al. (2019) to measure children’s inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. Academic skill (literacy and numeracy) were also collected. Participating children were on average 9.3 years old and attended primary school in the urban Greater Accra region.
In our analysis, accuracy and raw RT scores had unique predictive validity for literacy and numeracy. Greater accuracy and faster raw RT were associated with better academic skills (Table 1). ΔRT was not directly associated with academic skills, but the ΔRT x Accuracy interaction during the cognitive flexibility task was predictive of literacy skills. We found that ΔRT was positively related to academic skills for children with low accuracy (see Figure 1); in contrast, Camerota et al (2019) found that ΔRT was negatively related to academic skills with high accuracy for this task in their U.S. sample.
Results from our study suggest that the meaning of RT scores from EF tasks may differ between LMICs and HICs. Future research should examine how specific cultural and contextual factors could contribute to this difference. For example, children in LMICs are less familiar with tablets, and may benefit from slowing down more on cognitively challenging tasks. Higher ΔRT may indicate better behavioral self-regulation and less impulsive responses that contribute to improved academic performance. Our results challenge the generalizability of EF task scoring and is a first step to better understand the role of RT in LMICs and its implications for academic outcomes.

Authors

• Ishita Ahmed, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Michael J. Sulik, Stanford University

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania

• Jelena Obradovic, Stanford University