UC Davis

Cognitive control–the executive processes and functions that allow us to coordinate, regulate, and adapt behaviors in the service of goals–shows a prolonged developmental time course across childhood and into early adulthood. One major development in cognitive control across the childhood years is children’s transition from primarily relying on reactive control, engaging control as needed in response to in-the-moment cues, to increasingly using proactive control, preparing cognitive resources to an anticipated need for control. While much work has examined this reaction to proactive transition and its influences on other executive functions and behaviors, few have empirically examined the psychometric properties of cognitive control measures used in different age groups. In this dissertation, I investigated the theoretical bases and measurement properties of commonly used indices of cognitive control (from the AX-Continuous Performance Task and the Cued Task Switching Paradigm) across ages (5-6 year-olds, 11-12 year-olds, and adults), and examine their relations with adaptive decision making, inhibitory control and context monitoring, and measures of mindfulness (child-report and breath accounting accuracy). Results showed that measures of cognitive control displayed different psychometric properties across age groups (Chapter 2), and proactive control in particular may be dissociable into implicit and explicit forms in 9 - 13 year olds, as a measure of implicit but not explicit proactive control predicted their response inhibition (Chapter 3). In terms of relationships to children’s behaviors, proactive control did not predict adaptive decision making in 5-6 year-olds (Chapter 2) nor self-reported mindfulness in 9 - 13 year-olds (Chapter 4). However, in 9 - 13 year olds, overall faster reaction times and accuracy rates in Cued Task Switching predicted higher levels of mindfulness as measured by breath counting accuracy, suggesting that cognitive control might play a role in state-level mindfulness. Overall, findings shed light on relationships between cognitive control and the development of adaptive behaviors and self-regulation, and highlight the need to examine existing cognitive measures to verify their developmental-appropriateness for children.