Do Children Generate Labels to Support Proactive Control?

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/0c483j72b

Abstract

An important shift in development is the increasing ability to proactively engage executive function instead of reactively. We tested the possible influence of language on proactive control. We used a task in which children had to track a moving novel target shape on a screen in the midst of novel distractor shapes and then identify where the target disappeared. There was no difference in tracking accuracy for previously unseen and unlabeled targets between children who received useful labels for a set of shapes and those who only received generic names. However, children who only received generic names were more likely to provide a label for the unlabeled shapes compared to children who received labels. It is possible that these labels were generated during the task to aid the engagement of proactive control. These findings add to our limited understanding of the relationship between language and proactive control, and provide future directions, such as ways to better measure self-generated labels.

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