Poster #13 - The more at home, the more you roam: Number of children in household predicts 17- and 21-month-olds’ distractibility during play

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Current methods for assessing executive functioning (EF) in children younger than preschool-aged rely on parental-report measures of children’s behavior. These subjective measures may be less reliable than objective measures, and make it difficult to draw direct comparisons with older populations, for whom objective EF measures are available. To create an objective measure of EF suitable for testing infants and toddlers, as well as older children, we created a structured play session that measures children’s distractibility when presented with intermittent distractor video clips. We assessed the relationship between children’s distractibility in this task with other factors purported to measure or influence children’s EF: age, subjective parental-report measures from the Early Childhood Behaviors Questionnaire (ECBQ; Putnam et al., 2006), and the number of other children in the household, which has been found to positively correlate with EF skills in preschool-aged children (e.g., McAlister & Peterson, 2010).

To date, thirteen 17-month-olds (M = 17.2 mos; SD = 0.6; 8 females) and eight 21-month-olds (M = 21.4 mos; SD = 0.5; 4 females) completed two two-minute play sessions. In the first, children played with a toy in the absence of distractors. In the second, children played with a different toy while short distractor video clips played at intervals on a large monitor to their left. We measured the proportion of time children attended to the toys during each play session, and created a difference score in which more negative values indicated greater reduction in attention to the toys in the distractor condition from baseline. Caretakers also filled out the ECBQ, from which we calculated composite scores of children’s attentional focusing, attention shifting, and perceptual sensitivity. These values, along with the child’s age and the number of other children in the household, were entered as predictors in a linear model.

Parental-report measures of children’s EF skills did not correlate with our behavioral measure, which may mean that subjective measures do not adequately capture EF in this population. Only the number of other children in the household correlated with participants’ difference in proportional attention to the toys between conditions (Table 1). Interestingly, while previous findings show that having more children in the household promotes EF in preschool-aged children, here we find the opposite pattern: Participants with more children in the household showed a greater reduction in attention to the toys (i.e., greater distractibility) when distractors were present (Figure 1). Prior research has often found no effect of number of siblings on EF among preschool-aged children younger than 39 months (e.g., Cole & Mitchell, 2000). It has been reasoned that younger children may not be developmentally ready to benefit from their siblings in this way (Ruffman et al., 1998). Our results may be consistent with this interpretation, but also suggest that rather than not being helpful, having more siblings may be temporarily detrimental to children’s EF. This may open interesting possibilities for future research into whether this holds for a wider range of EF skills, and ongoing data collection will answer whether this pattern changes with development.

Authors

• Karen E. Mulak, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Lucy Erickson, Carnegie Mellon University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emily Shroads, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author

• Monita Chatterjee, Boys Town National Research Hospital
  Non-Presenting Author

• Janet E Frick, University of Georgia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rochelle Newman, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author