How does the ability to stop automatic habits develop in kids?
Children's ability to suppress automatic responses improves rapidly as they grow, with performance on a low-memory inhibitory task leveling off in early childhood for accuracy and in later childhood for speed.
Source
Age-related trends of inhibitory control in Stroop-like big-small task in 3 to 12-year-old children and young adults
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Same vs opposite vocal size-naming (Stroop-like big-small) across six age bands; vocal errors and RT
- N
- N=113 · Six groups from 3–4 years through young adults; Japanese as first language
- Population
- Typically developing Japanese preschoolers, schoolchildren, and university students
- Outcome
- Inhibitory error rates that plateau after ages 5–6, with opposite-vs-same RT costs persisting through ages 9–10
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Inspect source passages
How does the ability to stop automatic habits develop in kids?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
20 stimuli were presented for each task condition
During the test phase, the participant was asked to respond as quickly and accurately as possible to a series of 20 stimuli (10 big circles and 10 small circles) for each task condition.
3 to 4-year olds showed significant differences in error rates between conditions
Post hoc Bonferroni tests also yielded significant differences between conditions for 3 to 4-year olds and 5 to 6-year olds ( p <0.05), but not for other age groups (7 to 8-year olds, p = 0.084; 9 to 10-year olds, p = 0.107; 11 to 12-year olds, p = 0.588; young adults, p = 1.00).
What they did
Researchers tested 113 typically developing people divided into six age groups, ranging from young children to young adults. Participants completed a 'same' condition and an 'opposite' condition, with each condition consisting of 20 trials. Vocal responses and correct response times were recorded to track development.
What they found
The researchers compared performance across conditions and found that error rates significantly differed between the same and opposite conditions only for 3 to 4-year olds and 5 to 6-year olds, but not for older groups. However, analysis of correct response times showed that kids in the 7 to 8-year old and 9 to 10-year old brackets still showed significant differences between conditions. No significant differences in error rates or response times were found between the first five trials and the last five trials, indicating that performance did not deteriorate over a session.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study is limited by its cross-sectional design, which does not track individual developmental changes over time. Also, an additional 14 participants were tested but excluded, including 9 outliers, one who failed the pretest, and 3 excluded due to recording errors. Because the sample sizes per group were relatively small, replication with larger samples is needed to confirm the exact age where performance convergence occurs.
Key terms
- Inhibitory control
- The cognitive ability to suppress an automatic, dominant response in order to perform a less natural but correct action.
- Stroop effect
- A phenomenon where a delay in reaction time occurs because of mismatching cognitive stimuli, forcing the brain to resolve a conflict.
- Working memory
- The mental system responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating information needed to perform cognitive tasks.
- Prepotent response
- An automatic, highly learned, or natural behavioral reaction to a specific stimulus.
- Cross-sectional design
- A research method that compares different groups of participants of varying ages at a single point in time.
- Interference
- The slowdown in processing speed or increase in errors caused by competing mental processes.
Flashcards
0 of 22 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
How does this study define inhibitory control?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use circles of different sizes instead of the traditional day-night pictures?
The traditional day-night task requires children to learn abstract associations, which taxes working memory. Big and small circles represent concrete physical properties that children learn early, allowing the task to isolate inhibitory control rather than memory capacity.
Why was it important that performance did not drop during the session?
In older day-night tasks, young kids often performed worse toward the end, suggesting they forgot the rules. Because performance remained steady here, it indicates that participants kept the rules in mind and the task successfully kept memory demands low.
Which age groups struggled the most with accuracy?
Only children in the 3 to 4-year old and 5 to 6-year old groups made significantly more mistakes in the opposite condition than in the same condition.
Did many children fail to complete the task?
Very few; only one child failed the pretest for the opposite condition, which is a major improvement over older versions of the task where many young participants failed.
More on Development