Using language to get ready: Familiar labels help children engage proactive control.

A key developmental transition is the ability to engage executive functions proactively in advance of needing them. We tested the potential role of linguistic processes in proactive control. Children completed a task in which they could proactively track a novel (target) shape on a screen as it moved unpredictably amid novel distractors and needed to identify where it disappeared. Children almost always remembered which shape to track, but those who learned familiar labels for the target shapes before the task had nearly twice the odds of tracking the target compared with those who received experience with the targets but no labels. Children who learned labels were also more likely to spontaneously vocalize labels when the target appeared. These findings provide the first evidence of a causal role for linguistic processes in proactive control and suggest new ideas about how proactive control develops, why language supports a variety of executive functions, and how interventions might best be targeted.

Endogenously and exogenously driven selective sustained attention: Contributions to learning in kindergarten children.

Selective sustained attention is vital for higher order cognition. Although endogenous and exogenous factors influence selective sustained attention, assessment of the degree to which these factors influence performance and learning is often challenging. We report findings from the Track-It task, a paradigm that aims to assess the contribution of endogenous and exogenous factors to selective sustained attention within the same task. Behavioral accuracy and eye-tracking data on the Track-It task were correlated with performance on an explicit learning task. Behavioral accuracy and fixations to distractors during the Track-It task did not predict learning when exogenous factors supported selective sustained attention. In contrast, when endogenous factors supported selective sustained attention, fixations to distractors were negatively correlated with learning. Similarly, when endogenous factors supported selective sustained attention, higher behavioral accuracy was correlated with greater learning. These findings suggest that endogenously and exogenously driven selective sustained attention, as measured through different conditions of the Track-It task, may support different kinds of learning.