Mirroring trends in EF research on children aged 24 months and over (e.g., Ansell, Wouldes, & Harding, 2017 Carlson, 2005 Garon, Smith, & Bryson, 2014 Hughes & Ensor, 2005 Leve et al., 2013 Mulder, Hoofs, Verhagen, Van der Veen, & Leseman, 2014 Wiebe, Espy, & Charak, 2008), researchers have extended the task battery approach to research on infants aged between 12 and 15 months (Johansson, Marciszko, Brocki, & Bohlin, 2016 Miller & Marcovitch, 2015 Wiebe, Lukowski, & Bauer, 2010). Although the results suggested similar patterns of growth across a range of EF tasks, these studies were based on single tasks and so the relations between these measures were not examined. While ground breaking, these early findings did not focus on individual differences in EF. These studies provided evidence for the early emergence of EF and demonstrated the feasibility of testing EF in the first 2 years of life. Across several small‐scale longitudinal studies, Diamond and colleagues demonstrated age‐related growth in performance across the A‐not‐B, the Delayed Response (a task structurally similar to the A‐not‐B but with a fixed trial order), and object retrieval tasks over the first 2 years of life (Diamond, 1985, 1988). Both lesion studies in nonhuman animals (e.g., Diamond & Goldman‐Rakic, 1989) and neuroimaging studies in human infants (e.g., Bell, 2012) support the validity of these tasks as measures of frontal function. Diamond argued that infants’ completion of the A‐not‐B task (in which infants must locate an object hidden in one of two alternating locations) hinged on the ability to hold information about the object's location in mind (working memory) and overcome a prepotent response to reach toward a previously rewarded location (conflict inhibition Diamond, 1985 Diamond & Doar, 1989).
Pioneering work by Diamond and colleagues (Diamond, 1985, 1988) provided important early insights into the development of EF across the first 2 years of life. The overarching aim of the current study was to investigate the relations between and infant predictors of individual differences in EF in the second year of life.Measuring EF in the First 2 Years of Life
Although great progress has been made in understanding EF in early and middle childhood, relatively little attention has centered on individual differences in EF in children younger than 24 months. Interest in EF is not surprising given that longitudinal studies demonstrate that normative individual differences in EF predict children's social understanding (e.g., Devine & Hughes, 2014), academic success (e.g., Blair, Ursache, Greenberg, & Veron‐Feagans, 2015), and behavioral adjustment (e.g., Schoemaker, Mulder, Dekovic, & Matthys, 2013). Research on the development, correlates, and consequences of EF has flourished in developmental science with the proliferation of child‐friendly measures (e.g., Carlson, 2005). EF refers to a set of interrelated, domain general cognitive skills associated with the prefrontal cortex, namely: (a) the ability to override entrenched habits or impulses (or “inhibition”), (b) the capacity to update information held in mind (or “working memory”), and (c) the capability to switch between tasks (or “cognitive flexibility” Friedman & Miyake, 2017).
Children's ability to control their own thoughts and actions, or “executive function” (EF), has been a topic of intense interest in the field of developmental science for the past two decades (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013).
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