Individual differences in executive functioning predict preschoolers’ improvement from theory-of-mind training.

Abstract

Twenty-four 3.5-year-old children who initially showed poor performance on false-belief tasks participated in a training protocol designed to promote performance on these tasks. Our aim was to determine whether the extent to which children benefited from training was predicted by their performance on a battery of executive functioning tasks. Findings indicated that individual differences in executive functioning performance strongly and consistently predicted improvement in children's false-belief performance and their ability to appropriately explain false-belief-based behavior, both during the training period and during the posttest. These findings were robust after statistically controlling for several relevant covariates. These results are consistent with the suggestion that executive functioning skills promote developments in theory of mind by facilitating the ability to reflect upon and learn from relevant experience.

Children's developing realization that some stories are true: Links to the understanding of beliefs and signs

“…Finally, EF abilities may impact the conceptual knowledge that children bring to the task. Recent findings show that individual differences in EF abilities predict the extent to which children can benefit from theory-of-mind training (Benson, Sabbagh, Carlson, & Zelazo, 2013). Similarly, individual differences in EF abilities might predict the extent to which children bring to any given narrative the conceptual insight that stories vary in terms of whether they include fantastical elements or stick closely to reality.…”

Emotion understanding in preschool children

“…Within this perspective, it is also possible that children who are better able to executively control their behaviors, may develop better relations with others, which, in turn, are fundamental for the development of emotion understanding (Harris, 2008). Alternatively, the ''expression account'' (Benson et al, 2013;Carlson et al, 2013) suggests that the association between the two variables may be due to methodological issues. The task used to assess emotion understanding requires children to infer emotions based on stories that they must decode and then to adjust their answer from story to story.…”

“…A growing body of literature has highlighted the bidirectional relation between EFs and social interaction, as well as the cognitive skills implicated in such relations (Moriguchi, 2014). For instance, longitudinal and intervention studies indicate that EFs are necessary for the emergence of ToM (Benson, Sabbagh, Carlson, & Zelazo, 2013;Carlson, Koenig, & Harms, 2013). In addition, we argue that EFs may be relevant for emotion understanding for two other reasons.…”

Stability in Maternal Autonomy Support and Child Executive Functioning

“…Studies of EF in preschoolers and older children have led to the crucial finding that this set of higher-order cognitive processes is linked to school readiness (Blair and Peters 2003), academic performance (e.g., Biederman et al 2004;Bull et al 2008;St. Clair-Thompson and Gathercole 2006), social and moral competence (e.g., Clarke et al 2002;, theory of mind (e.g., Benson et al 2013;Hughes and Ensor 2007;Moses and Tahiroglu 2010), and early onset disorders, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (e.g., Clarke et al 2002;Pennington and Ozonoff 1996;Semrud-Clikeman et al 2010). Overall, there is compelling support for the idea that individual differences in EF are meaningful for child functioning; much less is known, however, about the mechanisms that underlie the development of such individual differences.…”