How does self-control develop in infants and toddlers?
Different types of self-control develop along independent paths during infancy and do not show stable individual differences between the first and second assessments.
Source
Development of directed global inhibition, competitive inhibition and behavioural inhibition during the transition between infancy and toddlerhood
What they did
Researchers tracked self-control in a sample of one hundred and fifteen infants. They tested these children at 10 months of age and again at 16 months of age, using tasks such as a toy prohibition game, a touchscreen game, and the A-not-B task.
What they found
The researchers found that while toddlers at 16 months of age showed improved self-control compared to their performance at 10 months, individual performance was highly unstable over time. There were no meaningful correlations between an infant's ability to resist touching a prohibited object and their ability to solve competitive choice tasks. This suggests that different types of inhibitory control do not develop under a single unified system during infancy but instead follow separate, independent paths.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study does not establish a long-term developmental trajectory because the testing only spanned from 10 to 16 months of age. It cannot rule out the possibility that language comprehension issues or social confusion caused infants to fail the prohibition tasks rather than a lack of self-control. Furthermore, severe floor effects at 10 months of age—where most infants touched the forbidden objects very quickly—may have hidden true underlying links and stability over time.
Key terms
- Inhibitory control
- The cognitive ability to resist habits, temptations, or distractions and pause or change an action.
- Directed global inhibition
- The ability to completely stop or withhold a physical action in response to an external command or rule.
- Competitive inhibition
- The ability to suppress a well-practiced, automatic action in order to perform a different, correct action.
- Behavioural inhibition
- A reactive, involuntary temperament trait characterized by fearfulness and hesitation in unfamiliar situations.
- A-not-B task
- A classic experimental task where an object is hidden in one location multiple times and then moved to another location, testing whether a child can suppress the habit of reaching for the initial location.
- Floor effect
- A statistical phenomenon occurring when a measurement instrument is too difficult, causing most participants to score near the minimum possible score.
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Quiz yourself
How does top-down inhibitory control (IC) differ from behavioral inhibition as defined in developmental psychology?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use touchscreens to test infants?
Touchscreen games are highly engaging, allow for highly standardized and automated test trials, require fewer physical props that might distract the infant, and reduce potential social confusion caused by a human experimenter hiding objects.
Did the researchers find any differences in self-control between baby boys and baby girls?
No, the study analyzed gender differences and found no significant differences in performance between male and female infants on any of the inhibitory control or behavioral tasks.
How does behavioral inhibition differ from inhibitory control?
Behavioral inhibition is a reactive, involuntary, and temperament-based hesitation when facing something new, whereas inhibitory control is a voluntary, deliberate, and top-down cognitive process used to manage thoughts and actions.
Why is there so little stability in infants' performance between 10 and 16 months?
The brain's prefrontal cortex and frontoparietal neural networks undergo rapid, dramatic reorganization and fine-tuning during this exact age transition, which naturally causes shifts in individual performance over time.
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