Children's willingness to engage cognitive control

Children's cognitive control increases dramatically across development. These changes reflect a confluence of what children can do (their control capacities), what they know how to do (task understanding, familiarity, and strategies), and what they are willing to do (their propensity to allocate, sustain, or withdraw control depending on the task and context). This chapter focuses on children's willingness to engage control, which has received comparatively less attention even though it has significant implications for understanding performance on cognitive control assessments and links with life outcomes, and for designing interventions to support children's cognitive control. We frame willingness within Expected Value of Control theory, which describes cognitive control allocation as the result of a cost-benefit decision process that integrates subjective effort costs, beliefs about efficacy, and the expected value of outcomes. Children calibrate their cognitive control engagement according to costs, efficacy, and expected value. These factors change based on external contexts, internal states, and developmental processes, while nonetheless showing stability within individuals. Cultural experiences provide one external context that can influence when control feels meaningful and worthwhile, such that cross-cultural variations in cognitive control can also be understood in terms of willingness. Together, this framing has key implications for interpreting why cognitive control predicts life outcomes: Children who perform well on cognitive control tasks may also be more consistently willing to engage control across real-world contexts, and some children may reliably experience contexts that encourage greater willingness, suggesting that the predictive validity of cognitive control task partly reflects stable differences in willingness in addition to control capacities.