Understanding autonomous behaviour development: Exploring the developmental contributions of context-tracking and task selection to self-directed cognitive control

Aurélien Frick, Maria A. Brandimonte, Nicolas Chevalier

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Gaining autonomy is a key aspect of growing up and cognitive control development across childhood. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in an autonomous (or self-directed) fashion. Here, we propose that in order to successfully engage self-directed control, children identify and achieve goals by tracking contextual information and using this information to select relevant tasks. To disentangle the respective contributions of these processes, we manipulated the difficulty of context-tracking via altering the presence or absence of contextual support (Study 1) and the difficulty of task selection by varying task difficulty (a)symmetry (Study 2) in 5-6 and 9-10-year-olds, and adults. Results suggested that, although both processes contribute to successful self-directed engagement of cognitive control, age-related progress mostly relates to context-tracking.
Original languageEnglish
Article numbere13222
JournalDevelopmental Science
Early online date25 Dec 2021
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 25 Dec 2021

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • cognitive control development
  • context-tracking
  • self-directed control
  • task selection
  • voluntary task-switching

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