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Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
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Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

Published on: April 28, 2016

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

Adele Diamond1, Natasha Kirkham, Dima Amso

  • 1Center for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Waltham 02452, USA. adele.diamond@umassmed.edu

Developmental Psychology
|May 15, 2002
PubMed

Insights

Young children struggle with the day-night task due to high inhibitory demands. Reducing this demand, rather than simplifying rules, significantly improves their performance by allowing more computation time.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Child Psychology
  • Executive Functions

Background:

  • The day-night task assesses children's ability to inhibit prepotent responses and follow complex rules.
  • Young children frequently fail this task, indicating challenges with cognitive control and rule learning.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying young children's difficulties with the day-night task.
  • To identify task modifications that improve performance in 4- and 4.5-year-old children.

Main Methods:

  • Systematic variations of the day-night task were administered to 96 children aged 4 and 4.5 years.
  • Interventions included rule chunking, reducing inhibitory demands with unrelated responses, and introducing stimulus-response delays.
  • Performance was compared across different task conditions to isolate factors affecting success.

Main Results:

  • Training on rule chunking did not improve performance.
  • Reducing inhibitory demand by using unrelated responses (e.g., "dog," "pig") significantly enhanced performance.
  • Performance worsened when the correct response was semantically related to the inhibited response (opposites).
  • Inserting a delay between stimulus and response, even with distraction, improved accuracy, suggesting a need for computation time.

Conclusions:

  • Young children's failure on the day-night task is primarily linked to high inhibitory demands, not just memory load.
  • Semantic relatedness between correct and incorrect responses exacerbates inhibitory difficulties.
  • Children require sufficient time to process and compute the correct response, and are more successful when this time is enforced.

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