7th of March 2017 at 13.00 (External Seminar)
Location. B34 Malet Street, Birkbeck College
Dr Karla Holmboe University of Essex
Longitudinal development of attention and executive functions during the first year of life
Executive functions (EF) are a set of skills that allow us to control our thoughts and actions in everyday life. These skills improve rapidly during early childhood as children develop their working memory capacity, their ability to exert inhibitory control, and their cognitive flexibility. Evidence suggests that early forms of EF, such as the ability to inhibit a prepotent response, are in place around 9 months of age. However, little is known about whether such abilities exist earlier than this. It is also possible that more basic attentional processes in early infancy form the ‘building blocks’ of emerging EF towards the end of the first year of life. In this talk, I will present data from a longitudinal study investigating these questions in a cohort of 104 infants. Infants were tested on two simple attention tasks at 4 months of age and on EF tasks at 6 and 9 months of age. The results provided little evidence that basic attentional functions at 4 months formed precursors for emerging EF at 6 and 9 months. However, there was good evidence for stable individual differences in EF from 6 months of age. This suggests that EF emerges earlier than previously assumed. Future research into individual differences in the development of EF could benefit from starting as early as the middle of the first year of life.