Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten.

This study examined the role of self-regulation in emerging academic ability in one hundred and forty-one 3- to 5-year-old children from low-income homes. Measures of effortful control, false belief understanding, and the inhibitory control and attention-shifting aspects of executive function in preschool were related to measures of math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Results indicated that the various aspects of child self-regulation accounted for unique variance in the academic outcomes independent of general intelligence and that the inhibitory control aspect of executive function was a prominent correlate of both early math and reading ability. Findings suggest that curricula designed to improve self-regulation skills as well as enhance early academic abilities may be most effective in helping children succeed in school.

[1]  G. Ladd,et al.  Children's social and scholastic lives in kindergarten: related spheres of influence? , 1999, Child development.

[2]  A. Diamond,et al.  Prefrontal cortex cognitive deficits in children treated early and continuously for PKU. , 1991, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[3]  P. Zelazo,et al.  The Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST): A Measure of Executive Function in Preschoolers , 2001, Developmental neuropsychology.

[4]  Andreas Nieder,et al.  A parieto-frontal network for visual numerical information in the monkey. , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[5]  G. Kochanska,et al.  Inhibitory control in young children and its role in emerging internalization. , 1996, Child development.

[6]  G. Gerardi-Caulton,et al.  Sensitivity to spatial conflict and the development of self-regulation in children 24–36 months of age. , 2000 .

[7]  Scott A Miller,et al.  A Cross-Task Comparison of False Belief Understanding in a Head Start Population , 1996, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[8]  P. Eslinger,et al.  A developmental neuroscience approach to the study of school readiness. , 2007 .

[9]  D. Stuss,et al.  Principles of frontal lobe function , 2002 .

[10]  Philip David Zelazo,et al.  Development of “hot” executive function: The children’s gambling task , 2004, Brain and Cognition.

[11]  P. Zelazo,et al.  An age-related dissociation between knowing rules and using them ☆ , 1996 .

[12]  K. Lloyd.  Do As I Say, Not As I Do , 1994, The Behavior analyst.

[13]  C. Blair.  How similar are fluid cognition and general intelligence? A developmental neuroscience perspective on fluid cognition as an aspect of human cognitive ability. , 2006, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[14]  Claire Hughes,et al.  Executive Function and Theory of Mind in 2 Year Olds: A Family Affair? , 2005, Developmental neuropsychology.

[15]  P. J. Brooks,et al.  The role of selective attention in preschoolers’ rule use in a novel dimensional card sort , 2003 .

[16]  M. Posner,et al.  Developing mechanisms of temperamental effortful control. , 2003, Journal of personality.

[17]  H. Wimmer,et al.  Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception , 1983, Cognition.

[18]  Josef Perner,et al.  Disentangling dimensions in the dimensional change card-sorting task. , 2005, Developmental science.

[19]  Philip David Zelazo,et al.  Inhibition as a problem in the psychology of behavior , 2003 .

[20]  Ulrich Müller,et al.  The development of executive function in early childhood: I. The development of executive function. , 2003 .

[21]  T. Klingberg.  Development of a superior frontal–intraparietal network for visuo-spatial working memory , 2006, Neuropsychologia.

[22]  A. Arnsten,et al.  Adolescence: Vulnerable Period for Stress‐Induced Prefrontal Cortical Function? Introduction to Part IV , 2004, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[23]  Claire Hughes,et al.  Executive function in preschoolers: Links with theory of mind and verbal ability , 1998 .

[24]  G. Scerif,et al.  Executive Functioning as a Predictor of Children's Mathematics Ability: Inhibition, Switching, and Working Memory , 2001, Developmental neuropsychology.

[25]  L. Moses,et al.  Individual differences in inhibitory control and children's theory of mind. , 2001, Child development.

[26]  Steven L. Thorne,et al.  Rising mean IQ: Cognitive demand of mathematics education for young children, population exposure to formal schooling, and the neurobiology of the prefrontal cortex , 2005 .

[27]  Stanislas Dehaene,et al.  Arithmetic and the Brain This Review Comes from a Themed Issue on Cognitive Neuroscience Edited the Intraparietal Sulcus and Number Sense Number Sense in the Animal Brain , 2022 .

[28]  H. Groenewegen,et al.  The prefrontal cortex and the integration of sensory, limbic and autonomic information. , 2000, Progress in brain research.

[29]  Jocelyne Bachevalier,et al.  The Orbitofrontal–amygdala Circuit and Self-regulation of Social–emotional Behavior in Autism , 2022 .

[30]  A. Nieder.  Counting on neurons: the neurobiology of numerical competence , 2005, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[31]  M. Reiser,et al.  The relations of effortful control and reactive control to children's externalizing problems: a longitudinal assessment. , 2003, Journal of personality.

[32]  Marcus E. Raichle,et al.  Suppression of Regional Cerebral Blood during Emotional versus Higher Cognitive Implications for Interactions between Emotion and Cognition , 1998 .

[33]  Temperament and the development of personality. , 1994, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[34]  Laura J. Claxton,et al.  Individual differences in executive functioning and theory of mind: An investigation of inhibitory control and planning ability. , 2004, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[35]  Tracy L. Spinrad,et al.  Toward a developmental model of child compliance: the role of emotion regulation in infancy. , 1999, Child development.

[36]  H. Swanson,et al.  Reading comprehension and working memory in learning-disabled readers: Is the phonological loop more important than the executive system? , 1999, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[37]  J. Dunn,et al.  Trick or treat?: uneven understanding of mind and emotion and executive dysfunction in "hard-to-manage" preschoolers. , 1998, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[38]  A. Diamond,et al.  Development of an aspect of executive control: development of the abilities to remember what I said and to "do as I say, not as I do". , 1996, Developmental psychobiology.

[39]  S. Calkins,et al.  Regulatory Contributors to Children's Kindergarten Achievement , 2003 .

[40]  S. M. Carlson,et al.  Executive function and theory of mind: stability and prediction from ages 2 to 3. , 2004, Developmental psychology.

[41]  M. Raichle,et al.  Integration of emotion and cognition in the lateral prefrontal cortex , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[42]  M. Cox,et al.  School Readiness and the Transition to Kindergarten in the Era of Accountability. , 2007 .

[43]  M. Rothbart,et al.  Development of Short and Very Short Forms of the Children's Behavior Questionnaire , 2006, Journal of personality assessment.

[44]  M. Posner,et al.  Cognitive and emotional influences in anterior cingulate cortex , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[45]  Ulrich Müller,et al.  The development of executive function in early childhood. , 1991, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[46]  M. Rothbart,et al.  Temperament and the development of personality. , 1994, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[47]  F. Guay,et al.  Preschool behavior and first-grade school achievement : The mediational role of cognitive self-control , 1998 .

[48]  T. Senn,et al.  The Contribution of Executive Functions to Emergent Mathematic Skills in Preschool Children , 2004, Developmental neuropsychology.

[49]  C. Kopp.  Regulation of distress and negative emotions: A developmental view. , 1989 .

[50]  M. Gunnar,et al.  The anterior attention network: associations with temperament and neuroendocrine activity in 6-year-old children. , 2002, Developmental psychobiology.

[51]  H. Forssberg,et al.  Computerized training of working memory in children with ADHD--a randomized, controlled trial. , 2005, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

[52]  M. J. Emerson,et al.  The Unity and Diversity of Executive Functions and Their Contributions to Complex “Frontal Lobe” Tasks: A Latent Variable Analysis , 2000, Cognitive Psychology.

[53]  Stephanie M. Carlson,et al.  Preschool Children's Performance in Task Switching on the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task: Separating the Dimensions Aids the Ability to Switch , 2005, Developmental neuropsychology.

[54]  J. Dunn,et al.  Understanding mind and emotion: longitudinal associations with mental-state talk between young friends. , 1998, Developmental psychology.

[55]  Jean-Francois Mangin,et al.  Automatized clustering and functional geometry of human parietofrontal networks for language, space, and number , 2004, NeuroImage.

[56]  C. Pennartz,et al.  Cognition, emotion and autonomic responses: the integrative role of the prefrontal cortex and limbic structures: proceedings of the 21st International Summer School of Brain Research, held at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 23-27 August 1999 , 2000 .

[57]  Andrew J. Mashburn,et al.  Social Relationships and School Readiness , 2006 .

[58]  C. Blair,et al.  False-Belief Understanding in a Low-Income Population , 2003 .

[59]  H. Yoshikawa,et al.  Placing emotional self-regulation in sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts. , 2004, Child development.

[60]  J. Day,et al.  Maternal care, hippocampal synaptogenesis and cognitive development in rats , 2000, Nature Neuroscience.

[61]  A. Bechara.  The role of emotion in decision-making: Evidence from neurological patients with orbitofrontal damage , 2004, Brain and Cognition.

[62]  Craig K. Enders,et al.  The Performance of the Full Information Maximum Likelihood Estimator in Multiple Regression Models with Missing Data , 2001 .

[63]  G J Hitch,et al.  Working memory impairments in children with specific arithmetic learning difficulties. , 1999, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[64]  A. Bechara,et al.  The role of emotion in decision making: A cognitive neuroscience perspective , 2006 .

[65]  J D Gabrieli,et al.  Neural substrates of mathematical reasoning: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of neocortical activation during performance of the necessary arithmetic operations test. , 2001, Neuropsychology.

[66]  Natasha Z. Kirkham,et al.  ARTICLE WITH PEER COMMENTARIES AND RESPONSE Helping children apply their knowledge to their behavior on a dimension-switching task , 2003 .

[67]  M. Reiser,et al.  The relations of effortful control and ego control to children's resiliency and social functioning. , 2003, Developmental psychology.

[68]  Bruce D. McCandliss,et al.  Training, maturation, and genetic influences on the development of executive attention. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[69]  R. Hauger,et al.  Working memory is more sensitive than declarative memory to the acute effects of corticosteroids: a dose-response study in humans. , 1999, Behavioral neuroscience.

[70]  C. Blair,et al.  School readiness. Integrating cognition and emotion in a neurobiological conceptualization of children's functioning at school entry. , 2002, The American psychologist.

[71]  M. Posner,et al.  Developing mechanisms of self-regulation , 2000, Development and Psychopathology.

[72]  J. Astington,et al.  Theory of mind development and social understanding. , 1995 .

[73]  M. Rothbart,et al.  Temperament, Self-Regulation, and Education. , 1998 .

[74]  John O. Willis,et al.  Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Third Edition , 2008 .

[75]  A. Diamond.  Normal development of prefrontal cortex from birth to young adulthood: Cognitive functions, anatomy, and biochemistry. , 2002 .

[76]  G. Ladd,et al.  School Readiness: Are There Social Prerequisites? , 2006 .

[77]  Roy P. Martin.  Prediction of Elementary School Achievement from Preschool Temperament: Three Studies. , 1988 .

[78]  C. Blair,et al.  Cortisol reactivity is positively related to executive function in preschool children attending head start. , 2005, Child development.