Poster #37 - Understanding Pretend Actions is Correlated with Delay of Gratification in Toddlers

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Increasing attention to the role of the executive functions in cognitive development has revealed that children with good executive function are more likely to do well in a number of domains, including pretending. Research has shown that inhibitory control, the ability to stop prepotent responses and/or delay responses, is positively correlated with preschoolers’ ability to pretend. Further, this relationship appears to be directional: engaging preschoolers’ inhibitory control causes an immediate boost in their pretense quality but pretending has no effect on inhibitory control (Van Reet, 2015), suggesting that inhibitory control is required for pretending. However, this relationship has never been explored in children younger than age three, so it is unclear when it first develops. This study was designed to fill this gap in our knowledge by investigating whether a relationship between pretending and inhibitory control is present in the toddler period, when production and comprehension of pretend actions typically emerges (Harris & Kavanaugh, 1993).
The participants were 83 toddlers (M = 23.1 months, range = 17 – 33 months, 52% female). Children’s understanding of pretense was assessed using a task from Harris and Kavanaugh (1993): in each trial children watched an experimenter pretend to make one of two animal figurines dirty and then they were asked to use a prop to “clean the X who is all dirty”. Participants also completed three age-appropriate EF tasks. The Shape Stroop task assessed conflict inhibitory control: children were shown drawings of a small fruit inside a large fruit (e.g., a small banana inside an apple) and asked to point to the little fruit (Kochanska et al., 2000). In the Delay of Gratification task, the experimenter placed a clear plastic cup over a sticker near the child; the child got to keep the sticker if they waited for a bell before retrieving it. Working memory was tested with the Hide The Pots task (Hughes & Ensor, 2005); children were asked to retrieve a sticker from under one of three opaque containers which were covered with a blanket before the child was allowed to search.
A single comprehension of pretense score and EF score was created for each child. They were modestly but significantly correlated, r = .21, p = .05. However, because the scores among the three EF measures were uncorrelated, they were also analyzed separately. A linear regression analysis predicting comprehension of pretense scores from age and the three EF task scores was significant (F = 3.47, p = .01, R² = .20), with Delay of Gratification scores emerging as the sole significant predictor (p = .01).
This research is the first to document the relationship between pretending and inhibitory control in children younger than three years old. Although further research will be needed to determine whether this relationship is directional, as it is in preschoolers, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that inhibitory skills are needed in order to pretend and understand pretense.

Author

• Jennifer Van Reet, Providence College
  Presenting Author