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Abstract:
Abstract: The literature surrounding the development of
executive function has grown tremendously, however, there is little
research looking at its trajectory in the transition between
infancy and early childhood. Absence of age-appropriate tasks has
prevented progress in understanding age-related changes in this
period, which are thought to be related to developments in
prefrontal cortex. We have adapted the elicited imitation task
(Bauer/Meltzoff) to permit examination of children's ability to
plan their behavior and inhibit prepotent responses. Children
watched while the experimenter sequentially modeled three events
using unique props. They were then given an array of props such
that all of the toys for one target event were present along with
distractor items from the other two events, without explicit
instructions as to which event they should imitate. We were
interested in seeing how children organized their behavior to
successfully replicate the target event, and how this changed from
20 to 27 months. Twenty-month-olds' performance was dominated by
perseveration on actions that were part of non-target events, and
this was a barrier to successful event completion. At 27 months,
children were able to overcome this tendency to perseverate and
produced more actions related to the target event than the
non-target events, and also were more likely to successfully
complete the target event.
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