Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Executive control processes allow task-appropriate behaviour across cognitive domains, yet, children have a long devel-opmental period with little or no control. Traditionally, this is viewed as a negative but necessary consequence of the timetaken for prefrontal development and learning control processes. Here we examine a recent model of controlled semanticcognition (https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/860528v1) as a test case to present evidence for an alternative (yet perhaps,complementary) view; that a developmental period without control has a positive functional role in learning. Varying thelength of a developmental period without control, we identify an optimal period (around one third of the learning time)which allows conceptual learning to happen much faster, without loss of conceptual abstraction ability. This speeding ismediated by the way control interacts with representation regions (deeper multimodal ¿ shallower input areas). This hasimplications for our understanding of controlled semantic cognition and the development of control more generally.