Age-related changes of cognitive flexibility and planning skills in school-age Moroccan children

Abstract

North African countries such as Morocco are scarcely the focus of neuropsychological studies, although the role of culture in cognition processes is widely recognized. Currently, studies on flexibility and planning skills in the Moroccan context are still lacking and there are no adapted tools to assess these functions in the country. In this scenario, this study aimed to adapt the Child Executive Functions Battery (CEF-B) tasks and the playing cards task of the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome for Children (BADS-C) to Morocco and provide preliminary normative data on the development of flexibility and planning. In addition, this study proposed to examine the effects of gender, parents’ education level and multilingualism on executive development. To this end, six tasks of the CEF-B were adapted through a translation and back-translation process and administered to 115 children aged 7–12 years. Results showed that the adopted procedure was sufficient for the cross-cultural adaptation of the tasks. Analyses showed a continuous increase with age on executive performance in most of the variables. However, gender and parents' level of education showed mostly non-significant effects. On the other hand, a significant effect of multilingualism was found on the two analyzed functions, with better results for multilingual children if compared to their bilingual peers. In general, results suggest that the identified pattern of development is consistent with international studies. Although normative data on executive functions are still lacking in Morocco, this unprecedented study will help better understand their development in this context.

Keywords:

• Assessment
• child
• CEF-B
• culture
• executive functions
• Morocco

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Benaissa Zarhbouch for contributing to this project. We also thank Lydie Iralde and Phillipe Allain for providing the Scripts task, Nathalie Fournet and Jean-Luc Roulin for the working memory tasks. We are thankful to Raja and Hakima for participation in data collection. Finally, we would like to thank all the experts who participated in the Morrocan adaptation of the CEF-B.