The development of complex action planning over toddlerhood and early preschool years

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

From 6 months, infants are able to plan simple actions. However, actions that we use in daily life are more complicated, involving multiple constraints and goals. Previous work has shown that tree-year-olds display good abilities to plan their actions according to a primary goal, but not with respect to a secondary constraint, in a colouring task (Freier et al., 2017). The current study aimed to investigate whether toddlers were able to take multiple constraints into account to achieve an overarching goal in their action planning, and examined whether executive function could be related to this complex action planning.

Twenty 2-year-olds (M = 24.8 months, SD = 12.7 days) and 20 2.5-year-olds (M = 30.1 months, SD = 21.2 days) completed a construction planning task using Duplo blocks to achieve the overarching goal of making a striped tower. The primary constraint was to build a tower to a height indicated on the wall. The secondary constraint was to make the tower striped, alternating between two colours of Duplo blocks provided. Inhibition, switching, working memory, alternating abilities and motor competence were also assessed for each toddler.

Out of 37 toddlers, 13 were able to build the tower to the correct height, but none were able to build the tower to the correct height and alternate colour to produce a striped tower. Tower building abilities were not related to age (Figure 1A). A binary logistic regression analysis showed that working memory score was a significant predictor of the ability to successfully meet the primary constraint (χ2(1) = 7.482, p = .006, Nagelkerke R2= .252).

Interestingly, toddlers who were able to meet the primary constraint (M = 8.62, SD = 3.23) had a lower working memory score than toddlers who were unable (M = 11.71, SD = 3.04) (Figure 1B). We suggest that children with a low WM capacity might focus on achieving the primary constraint, and forget about the secondary constraint, resulting in them executing actions according to the primary constraint of the overarching goal. However, children with a better WM capacity might try to keep track of both constraints, and attempt to align their actions accordingly, resulting in reduced probability of completing either of the constraints.

Furthermore, many toddlers experience problems executing their actions according to an alternating pattern in task in which they had to put coins in two boxes (Figure 2). Planning goal-directed alternating actions seems to be too complicated for toddlers, but the ability to plan easy alternating actions might improve over toddlerhood.

Currently, we aim to include a comparison group of 3-year-olds. We hypothesize that increase in WM capacity in early preschool years will result in an improved ability to keep track of both constraint and recovery of the ability to align actions according to the overarching goal in action planning. This would provide evidence that development of complex planning does not necessarily improves linearly over toddlerhood and preschool years. Moreover, we expect 3-year-olds to again improve their ability to plan easy alternating actions in the coin task.

Authors

• Lisanne Schroer, Erasmus University Rotterdam
  Presenting Author

• Richard P. Cooper, Birkbeck, University of London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Denis Mareschal, Birkbeck, Universty of London
  Non-Presenting Author