Measuring executive function in Indian mothers and their 4‐year‐old daughters

Abstract

Executive function (EF), including cognitive flexibility, attention shifting, and inhibitory control, has been linked to a range of outcomes across the lifespan, such as school readiness and academic functioning, job performance, health, and social-emotional wellbeing. Yet, research investigating links between parent EF and child EF is still limited. This is partly due to challenges in measuring the same EF abilities in parents and their children. The current study investigated the applicability of a computer-based battery of various EF tasks for use with both mothers and children. The battery included the following EF tasks: Dimensional Change Card Sort, Hearts and Flowers, and Fish Flanker. Participants were 80 Indian mothers and their 4-year-old daughters. EF was measured with regard to accuracy scores, response time, and inverse efficiency (IE) scores of the most complex blocks of each task. Scoring patterns indicated that children's task performance appeared to be determined by their ability to recognize the cue indicating which task to perform at any given trial and to inhibit an incorrect response. In contrast, mothers' performance appeared to be determined by response time, that is, their ability to be quick in giving the correct response. However, for both children and mothers, IE scores best captured individual differences in EF performance between participants. Furthermore, confirmatory factor analyses found that, for both children and mothers, all EF measures loaded on a latent factor, suggesting that the measures shared common variance in EF. There appeared to be no significant association between mothers' and children's EF scores, controlling for several background variables. Directions for further research include examining the applicability of the EF task battery to reliably describe developmental trajectories of EF abilities over time, and further examining variability in the parent-child EF association across the lifespan. Executive function (EF) is a set of higher-order cognitive processes that are essential to optimal cognitive and socialemotional functioning from early childhood into adulthood (Best & Miller, 2010;Blair, 2002;Duckworth & Steinberg, 2015;Miyake et al., 2000). Although EF is not synonymous with self-regulation, both constructs are intricately linked with one another (Blair & Ursache, 2011;Hofmann, Schmeichel, & Baddeley, 2012). The cognitive processes involved in EF assist the individual in self-regulation, that is, one's purposeful behavior to successfully complete goaldirected action (Blair & Ursache, 2011). The relationship between EF and self-regulation becomes particularly obvious when experiencing failure of self-regulation. Hofmann et al. (2012) argue that impairments in an individual's selfregulation can be best explained "via state reductions in EF as the underlying conceptual mechanism" (p. 177).It is well documented that EF undergoes significant developmental changes during the early childhood years that are linked to changes in the structural organization...

Bedtime routines child wellbeing & development

“…At the moment, mixed and relatively limited results exist with regards to early childhood executive functioning and its association with parental executive function with some studies reporting strong associations that faded over time as the child grew [ 48 ]. In our study, parents and children presented strong correlations across all different metrics of executive function in both the neuropsychological assessments and the self-report inventories.…”

Developing minds: Self‐regulation in children and adolescents across the globe

“…The seven papers included in this special issue cluster into three focus sections: (1) Measurement (von Suchodoletz, Slot, & Shroff, ; Wilson, Andrews, & Shum, ); (2) Antecedents and consequences of individual differences (Díaz & McClelland, ; Gunzenhauser, Saalbach, & von Suchodoletz, ; Hubert, Guimard, & Florin, ); and (3) Interventions (Lau, Zhou, & Lai, ; Thompson et al, ).…”

“…This study discusses issues regarding how to adapt these tasks for older children. Von Suchodoletz et al () have focused on executive functioning and have explored the applicability of a computerized test battery for both children and adults (girls and their mothers) in India. Findings indicate that the battery captures an underlying executive functioning factor in both children and adults.…”

Feedback Enhances Preschoolers’ Performance in an Inhibitory Control Task

“…Depending on the research question, there are different options to analyze flanker task data (e.g., sum scores, congruent-incongruent interference scores, or incongruent mean scores). Following previous research using the flanker task as a measure of inhibition (e.g., Lee et al, 2013; Zelazo et al, 2013; von Suchodoletz et al, 2017), we used incongruent mean scores. For the present study, this was especially expedient since feedback affected performance on congruent and incongruent trials differently.…”