The development of response inhibition in 4- and 5-year-old children

Abstract

Children younger than 6 years of age have difficulty in mastering discrimination learning tasks. It appears that the response component of such tasks presents particular problems for young children. The work of Luria (1973). Douglas (1975). Bell and Livesey (1985) and Diamond (1988) has indicated that children of this age lack the capacity to inhibit prepotent responses and that many of the observed deficits in discrimination learning relate to performance of the response rather than to learning the significance of cues (i.e., performance rather than cognitive deficits).

Two experiments were conducted to examine this age-related change in performance. Children were tested under either active condition (the child making the response) or verbal condition (the child telling the experimenter to respond) in an attempt to separate performance from cognitive components of the task. In Experiment 1,4- and 5-year-old children were tested on a go/no-go discrimination task requiring them to withhold a response in the presence Of the negative cue Over the age range there was a rapid increase in the proportion of children who might be classified as “inhibitors”. Four-year-olds made significantly more responses in the presence of the negative cue than did 5-year-olds who typically withheld such responses on all negative trials. No difference was found between the active and verbal conditions. hence the deficit shown by the 4-year olds could not be attributed unequivocally to a lack of response inhibition. In Experiment 2,4-year-oldr were given explicit instructions not to make a response to the negative cue. It was found that while performance of both groups improved over comparable groups in Experiment 1, performance by the verbal group was significantly better than the active group with the former producing near perfect performance. These results are discussed in relation to the notion that a lack of inhibition may mask cognitive competence.