Conditions under which young children can hold two rules in mind and inhibit a prepotent response.

Abstract

The day-night task requires saying "night" to a picture of the sun and "day" to a picture of the moon. In this investigation of why young children fail at this task, systematic variations of the task were administered to 96 children, half 4 years old and half 4 1/2 years old. Training children on the strategy of chunking the 2 rules into I ("say the opposite"), thus reducing memory load, did not help their performance. What helped was reducing the inhibitory demand by instructing them to say "dog" and "pig" (not "night" and "day") even though memory of 2 rules and inhibiting saying what the pictures represented were still required. Here the response to be activated and the response to be inhibited were unrelated. When the correct response was semantically related to, and the direct opposite of, the to-be-inhibited response, children performed poorly. Inserting a delay between stimulus and response helped even though that delay was filled with distraction. Young children apparently need several seconds to compute the answer on this task. Often they do not take the needed time; when forced to do so, they do well.

Setting goals to switch between tasks: Effect of cue transparency on children’s cognitive flexibility.

“…The present study brought only indirect evidence regarding the relation between goal setting and inner speech, as inner speech efficiency was not directly assessed and further research is needed to clarify the relation between inner speech and flexibility in children. Evidence for such a relation would back up the claim that language, in particular private or inner speech, is involved in executive control (e.g., Luria, 1961;Vygotsky, 1962), and it would shed new explanatory light on findings showing that children's executive control often benefits from overt verbalizations (e.g., Diamond, Kirkham, & Amso, 2002;Fernyhough & Fradley, 2005;Kirkham et al, 2003;Kray et al, 2008;Kray, Eenshuistra, Kerstner, Weidema, & Hommel, 2006;Müller et al, 2004).…”

Children's Moral Emotion Attribution in the Happy Victimizer Task: The Role of Response Format

“…Diamond et al (2002) tested 4-year-old children on the day-night task, in which participants have to keep two rules in mind and in which they have to inhibit the most salient dominant response. Introducing a ditty (i.e., the experimenter singing "Think about the answer.…”

The development of tool manufacture in humans: what helps young children make innovative tools?

“…In Diamond et al's study [62] children performed a simple Stroop-type task. When they saw a picture of the Sun they had to say 'night' and when they saw the Moon they had to say 'day'.…”