Children's development of executive function is a good candidate for studying cultural differences because it is a necessary capacity for becoming competent participants in cultural activities, and yet it is also likely to be shaped by culturally organized everyday experiences, with potential consequences for children's development and learning.…

Children with ADHD show deficits in executive functioning, especially the ability to inhibit inadequate responses, and deficits in motivational processes due to dopaminergic dysfunctions. There is evidence that rewards can foster inhibition in children with ADHD. However, most studies examined a wide age range of children above 7 years of age, so…

In contrast to research that examines the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and bilingualism on development by comparing clearly disparate groups, the present study investigated the role of subtle differences in these experiences for their joint impact on performance on a verbal fluency task and an executive function (EF) task. The study…

Previous studies demonstrated that dual-task impairments are higher in children than in young adults. A previous study systematically assessed the sources of these larger dual-task impairments by identifying age-related differences in capacity limitations during dual-task processing. Capacity limitations in central cognitive processes were present…

This article serves as an introduction to the Special Issue on "Decolonizing and Diversifying Research in Cognitive Development." The Special Issue comprises six articles: two articles are empirical articles that focus on executive function development in under-represented environments, two articles address barriers pathways toward…

The present study investigated the role of executive functions in the development of two aspects of timing: temporal reproduction and comparison. Children aged 7 and 10 years and young adults were asked to either reproduce target durations (i.e., reproduction task) or judge the similarity of two target durations (i.e., comparison task). These…

Young children tend to rely on reactive cognitive control (e.g. strongly slow down after an error), even when task accuracy would benefit from proactive cognitive control (taking a slower task approach up front). We investigated if giving young primary school children opportunities to repeatedly experience tasks where success rates depend on…

In the current study, we investigated the relations among maternal emotion socialization practices and children's inhibitory control (IC) performance in Chinese and European American families. Fifty-three Chinese (Mage = 60 months) and 52 European American (Mage = 50 months) children and their mothers participated in this study. Maternal emotion…

Inhibitory control is a core executive function that develops during childhood and is measured with tasks that require the inhibition of a dominant response. The current study examined the diagnostic value of using response accuracy and latency in a simple inhibitory control test, the computerized Pointing-Stroop Task (cPST), for kindergarten…

Cultural background can influence cognition, including executive functions (EFs), abilities that encompass skills responsible for self-regulation of thoughts and behavior. The seminal unity and diversity model of EFs proposes the existence, in adulthood, of at least three correlated but separable EF latent (shared variance in more than one…

It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more…

This study aimed to investigate the role of theory of mind (ToM) and both cool and hot executive function (EF) in accounting for prosocial behavior. Typically developing children of 3 to 6 years of age (N = 183) were assessed on a battery of EF and ToM tasks, while parents and teachers completed a questionnaire examining the children's prosocial…

The structure of executive functions in preschoolers is controversial. Miyake and colleagues found that, in adults, inhibition, shifting, and updating are correlated but distinguishable processes; this finding was sometimes replicated with schoolchildren. Based on schoolchildren data, Im-Bolter, Johnson, and Pascual-Leone proposed a four-component…

Understanding executive functions (EFs) development is of high value to global developmental science. Recent calls for a more inclusive and equitable developmental science argue that tasks and questionnaires that are developed using only a subset of the population are not likely to be appropriate for EFs measurement in global contexts unless…

Temperamental effortful control (EC) and executive functions (EF) are two frameworks for studying self-regulation in children. Despite stemming from different research traditions, they show many conceptual and theoretical similarities and their corresponding tasks are often used interchangeably. However, little is known about how and whether the…