Chunk #9 — Changes in Frontal EEG Coherence across Infancy Predict Cognitive Abilities at Age 3: The Mediating Role of Attentional Control — The Role of Attentional Control in the Development of Higher-Level Cognition
Delay of gratification paradigms are commonly used to assess behavioral IC in young children. In the classic gift delay task (Kochanska, Murray, Jacques, Koenig, & Vandegeest, 1996), children are given a gift (or interesting toy, etc.) and told to wait until an experimenter returns before engaging with the item. A slightly different version of this task (Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1972) gives children the choice between a small, immediate reward, and a larger, delayed reward. Across both versions of the task, studies have found considerable variability in 3-year olds’ ability to delay gratification (Atance & Jackson, 2009; Hongwanishkul, Happaney, Lee, & Zelazo, 2005), which may be partially explained by variation in their attentional control skills. Children who are able to strategically deploy their attention towards/away from stimuli in their environment can indirectly regulate their behavior by altering their motivational state. For example, a child might attend to interesting objects or sounds in their environment as a way to avoid engaging in a forbidden behavior. The effectiveness of redirecting attention as a strategy during this task has been demonstrated across multiple
