Behavioral IC, cognitive flexibility, and language been identified in recent empirical works as strong predictors of early school success (Yeniad et al., 2014; Allan et al., 2014; Gardner-Neblett et al., 2014), and identifying sources of variation in these important skills was a central aim of this study. Because newly emerging skills are thought to build upon existing capacities (Masten & Cicchetti, 2010), and because attentional control has shown important changes across the second year (Rothbart et al., 2003), the first aim of the study was to test whether observed attentional control in late infancy was associated with performance on a series of cognitive tasks at age 3. As hypothesized, accuracy on a visual search task at age 2, our observed measure of attentional control, was positively associated with performance on the DCCS task, delay of gratification during the Marker Delay task, and receptive vocabulary on the PPVT, all assessed at age 3. These effects were significant over and above their concurrent associations, suggesting that attentional control plays a unique role in the emergence of each. Because observed measures of attentional
