Executive function
Do 'hot' and 'cool' self-control develop differently in teens?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Cool, purely cognitive control skills improved steadily through the teenage years, while risk-related decision making peaked in mid-adolescence and was unrelated to the cool skills.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Six age groups (12 to 17) tested once on four cool EF tasks and the Cambridge Gambling Task; age compared by ANCOVA controlling vocabulary, and hierarchical regressions predicting grades and SDQ scores.
- N
- N=136 · 136 adolescents reported as the sample; some tables report degrees of freedom and a chi-square N (185) that do not match this, an unexplained inconsistency in the paper.
- Population
- Cantonese-speaking secondary-school students aged 12-17 in Hong Kong, bilingual in English, with normal intelligence
- Outcome
- Age differences on working memory, attentional control, cognitive flexibility, planning, inhibition, risk adjustment and delay aversion; self-reported grades; parent-reported emotional and behavioural difficulties
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Key findings
All cool measures tended to improve with age, with most gains appearing from mid-adolescence and planning improving late. Risk adjustment followed an inverted-U, rising to a peak at 14 and declining by 17; delay aversion showed a similar shape that was not statistically significant. Cool measures correlated modestly with each other but not with the hot measures. Stroop inhibition and cognitive flexibility added about 15% of explained variance in average grades, and risk adjustment alone added 10% of variance in parent-rated emotional problems.
Methodology
The author tested 136 Hong Kong secondary-school students aged 12 to 17 on four 'cool' executive function tasks (backward digit span, a rule-switching naming test, the Stockings of Cambridge planning task and the Stroop test) and one 'hot' task, the Cambridge Gambling Task, which measures how people adjust bets to the odds and how impatient they are. Age groups were compared while controlling for vocabulary as a proxy for general ability. Students reported their grades from report cards and parents rated emotional and behavioural difficulties.
Limitations
It is cross-sectional, so different teenagers were compared at each age; it cannot show how any individual develops, and the regressions cannot show that EF causes grades or emotional problems. Groups were small (roughly two dozen per age), grades were self-reported, and the only hot measure was one gambling task, so the 'hot versus cool' contrast rests on a single task. The sample was bilingual Cantonese-English speakers, which the author notes limits generalisation, and the reported sample sizes and degrees of freedom are internally inconsistent.
How this study connects
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