Poster #11 - Testing the Negative Priming Account of Perseverative Sorting in the Preschool Years

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

The Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) is commonly used to assess the development of cognitive flexibility during the preschool years (Zelazo, 2006). In the DCCS, children first sort cards by one dimension (e.g., color) and then are instructed to switch to sorting by a second dimension (e.g., shape). The majority of 3-year-olds fail to sort the cards by the second dimension in the post-switch phase of the task and instead continue to sort by the first dimension introduced in the pre-switch phase. This perseverative error has been attributed to both the activation of the pre-switch features (e.g., blue and green) and the inhibition – or, negative priming – of the post-switch features (e.g., hearts and stars; Müller, Dick, Gela, Overton, & Zelazo, 2006).

To test the negative priming account, Müller et al. (2006) used a version of the DCCS in which the features relevant to sorting in pre-switch (e.g., blue and green) are replaced in the post-switch phase by new features of the same dimension (e.g., red and yellow). The majority of 3-year-olds still perseverated in the post-switch phase, suggesting that children fail to sort according to the post-switch features (e.g., hearts and stars) because these features were ignored (negatively primed) during the pre-switch phase, not because children remain overly focused on the pre-switch features (e.g., blue and green) in the post-switch phase. However, it is possible that children perseverated in the task because they were overly focused on the pre-switch dimension (e.g., color), rather than specific pre-switch features (e.g., blue and green). Consequently, it is currently unclear whether negative priming drives perseverative sorting in the DCCS. Thus, the goal of the current study was to test the negative priming account by removing the entire pre-switch dimension from the post-switch trials, rather than just the pre-switch features.

In the current study, 48 3-year-olds completed either the standard version of the DCCS (control condition) or an experimental version of the DCCS that removed the pre-switch dimension from the sorting cards during the post-switch phase (e.g., first sort by color using cards featuring the dimensions of shape and color, then sort by shape using cards featuring the dimensions of shape and pattern). Chi-square analyses revealed that the proportion of participants who correctly sorted cards in the experimental condition (66.7%) was greater than in the control condition (37.5%), χ2 (1, 47) = 4.09, p = .04. These results indicate that perseverative sorting in the DCCS is driven in large part by difficulties overcoming the activation of the pre-switch dimension during the post-switch phase. Importantly, the results of this study do not rule out the possibility that negative priming also contributes to children’s perseverative sorting. However, these findings do indicate that negative priming plays a smaller role in children’s perseverative sorting than is commonly held.

Authors

• Jessica S Caporaso, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author

• Christopher D Erb, The University of Auckland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stuart Marcovitch, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author