Assessing executive functions in free-roaming 2- to 3-year-olds.

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Child Development

Background:

• Executive functions (EFs) are crucial for academic skills like literacy and numeracy.
• Higher-level EFs, such as planning, may also influence school outcomes.
• Assessing naturalistic higher-level EFs in preschoolers is challenging due to measurement difficulties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel, ecologically valid task for assessing planning in preschool-aged children.
• To evaluate the relationship between performance on this task and established measures of executive function.

Main Methods:

• A new task was developed involving building a Duplo tower with alternating color constraints.
• Children were instructed to build a tower to a specific height using two colors sequentially.
• Performance was analyzed in relation to age and laboratory-based executive function measures.

Main Results:

• Performance on task constraints showed age-related variations.
• Planning performance on the task predicted inhibitory control and working memory efficacy.
• The task demonstrated ecological validity for assessing executive functions in naturalistic settings.

Conclusions:

• The Duplo tower task offers a simple, cost-effective method for assessing executive function in toddlers.
• This task facilitates the study of executive function neurodevelopment in real-world contexts.
• It provides a valuable tool for understanding early childhood cognitive development and school readiness.