The development of self-regulatory systems during the preschool years is accompanied by a dramatic increase in the ability to inhibit actions based on the directions of others. Several tasks have shown evidence of changes in self-regulation during the fourth year of life. The current cross-sectional study used a Simple Simon task, in which 33 3-to 4-year-old children were asked to respond to the command of one large toy animal but not to the command of another. Three important aspects of self-regulation were examined: the ability to inhibit action in the face of conflict, error detection/correction and the use of verbal and physical control strategies. The ability to inhibit a response in this task increased from 22% to 90% between 36 and 48 months of age. Post error slowing of Reaction Time (RT) indicative of error detection emerged at about the same age as successful inhibition. Physical rather than verbal self-regulation strategies were spontaneously employed by children to aid in the process of inhibition.

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Children enjoy playing games. We can take advantage of this in the designs of computerized tasks that will engage their interest. These designs also serve to advance the study of chronometric measures, such as manual and saccadic reaction times and event related potentials, with young children. The goals of our method development are (1) to allow for comparable tasks across a wide variety of ages, (2) to make possible comparisons of child performance with data gathered in adult cognitive studies, and (3) to help to support inferences about the development of underlying mechanisms. We have designed a battery of computerized tasks in order to study the development of attention functions of alertness, orienting, and executive control during childhood. Our purpose is to describe each of these tasks in detail and present the results that have been obtained so far. The battery was tested using a sample of 5-year-old children as subjects.Posner and Petersen ( 1990) identified three attentional networks, each one having a unique function and a specified neuroanatomical basis. Posner and Raichle (1996) summarized the three attentional networks' localization in the brain, on the basis of behavioral, neuropsychological, and brain imaging data. ( I) The orienting network is responsible for focusing, disengaging, and shifting of spatial attention. These attentional operations involve a brain network including the posterior parietal lobes, the pulvinar nucleus ofthe thalamus and the superior colliculus. (2) The vigilance network is responsible for maintenance of an alert state. This function seems to involve the right lateralized parietal and right frontal cortical networks and also the locus coruleus. (3) The executive network is responsible for goal-directed behavior, target detection, error detection, conflict resolution and inhibition of automatic responses. The executive network seems to include the midline frontal areas including the anterior cingulate gyrus, supplementary motor area, and portions of the basal ganglia.---_ . _ ----------This work has been partially supported by a fellowship of the Yad Hanadiv-The Rothschild Foundation given to the first author. The programs described in this paper can be freely provided for research purposes. However. we are not able to provide support or to guarantee that they will work with different hardware equipment, especially since touch screens tend to differ. Correspondence should be addressed to A. Berger. Behavioral Science Department. Ben-Gurion University ofthe Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel (e-mail: andrea@bgumail.bgu.ac.il).Each attentional network has been studied in the literature using a particular paradigm that seems to serve as a marker task for that specific functional network. These paradigms are mostly based on manual responses and reaction time (RT) measurements. They have been developed for use with adult subjects (normal and neurological patient populations).All three networks of attention seem to undergo intense postnatal development (Ruff& Rothbart, 1996), ...

High stress and burnout are common for early childhood special educators, contributing to high rates of attrition, diminished educational effectiveness, and high turnover. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a promising approach for the prevention and treatment of a wide variety of problems. Using a randomized wait-list control design, this pilot study evaluated whether ACT workshops delivered to preschool teachers who serve children with developmental disabilities would improve stress-related problems of teachers (i.e., stress, depression, and burnout) and increase collegial support. At pretest, measures of experiential avoidance (EA) and mindful awareness (MA) showed significant relationships to reports of depression, stress, and burnout. The intervention reduced staff members' EA, increased teachers' MA and valued living (VL), and improved teachers' sense of efficacy. This suggests that ACT workshops can help influence factors affecting depression, stress, and burnout in an early childhood special education setting.