Gaining autonomy is a key aspect of growing up and cognitive control development across childhood. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in an autonomous (or self-directed) fashion. Here, we propose that in order to successfully engage self-directed control, children identify, and achieve goals by tracking contextual…

Emerging cognitive control supports increasingly efficient goal-directed behaviors. With age, children are increasingly expected to decide autonomously and with little external aid which goals to attain. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in such a self-directed fashion. The present study examined self-directed…

This study addressed the role of goal representation in preschoolers' inhibition and flexibility performance. A total of 56 4- and 5-year-olds were tested in an adapted version of the Shape School task where the difficulty of goal representation was manipulated by varying the degree of transparency of task cues. The findings showed that both age…