A cross-cultural investigation of inhibitory control, generative fluency, and anxiety symptoms in Romanian and Russian preschoolers

Abstract

The current study focused on the early development of inhibitory control in 5- to 7-year-old children attending kindergarten in two Eastern-European countries, Romania and Russia. These two countries share many aspects of child-rearing and educational practices, previously documented to influence the development of inhibitory control. Using the Lurian-based developmental approach offered by the Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment battery, the study aimed to contribute to cross-cultural developmental neuropsychology by exploring (a) early interrelationships between subcomponents of inhibitory control (response suppression and attention control) and generative fluency (verbal and figural) in these two cultures, as well as (b) the predictive value of external factors (culture and maternal education) and individual differences (age, gender, nonverbal intelligence, trait anxiety) on inhibitory control and fluency outcomes in children from both countries. First, findings in both culture samples suggest that even at this young age, the construct of inhibitory control cannot be considered a unitary entity. Second, differences in maternal education were not predictive of either inhibitory control or fluency scores. However, children’s attention control performance varied as a function of culture, and the direction of these cultural effects differed by whether the target outcome involved performance accuracy versus efficiency as an output. Findings also confirmed the previously documented intensive developmental improvement in preschoolers’ inhibitory control during this period, influencing measures of response suppression and particularly attention control. Finally, the results further stress the importance of individual differences effects in trait anxiety on attention control efficiency across cultures.

Keywords:

• Inhibition
• Developmental neuropsychology
• Preschoolers
• Cross-cultural
• Anxiety
• Fluency

This work was supported by a grant from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PNII-ID-PCCE-2011-2-0045, and by a grant from the Russian federal program “Scientific and Scientific-Pedagogical Personnel of Innovative Russia” for 2009–2013. We would like to thank Melinda Balog, Alexandra Juravle, Arina Kisel, Ekaterina Korobeynikova, Ramona Rad, and Anna Sladkova for their involvement in the data collection process.

Notes

¹ Although preschool education in many countries finishes by the age of 6, in both Romania and Russia children attend kindergarten until 7 years of age. During their last preschool year, they attend School Preparation Classes (World Data on Education, 7th ed., 2011).

² In the original article by Spence et al. (2001), the scale was administered for the age interval of 2.5–6.5 years, yet norms according to age group were only provided for 3- to 5-year-olds. In the Romanian adaptation of the test, we had a wider age sample of 3- to 7-year-olds.