Previous research shows that the development of response inhibition and drawing skill are linked. The current research investigated whether this association reflects a more fundamental link between response inhibition and motor control. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds (n = 100) were tested on measures of inhibition, fine motor control, and…

Understanding (a) how responses become prepotent provides insights into when inhibition is needed in everyday life. Understanding (b) how response prepotency is overcome provides insights for helping children develop strategies for overcoming such tendencies. Concerning (a), on tasks such as the day-night Stroop-like task, is the difficulty with…

We investigated the role of inhibitory control in young children's human figure drawing. We used the Bear-Dragon task as a measure of inhibitory control and used the classification system devised by Cox and Parkin to measure the development of human figure drawing. We tested 50 children aged between 40 and 64 months. Regression analysis showed…

The experience of regret rests on a counterfactual analysis of events. Previous research indicates that regret emerges at around 6 years of age, marginally later than the age at which children begin to answer counterfactual questions correctly. We hypothesized that the late emergence of regret relative to early counterfactual thinking is a result…

The response set effect has been observed in a number of developmental tasks that are proposed to required inhibition. This effect has been interpreted as evidence that the specific responses children plan to make in these tasks become prepotent. Here we investigated whether there is a response set effect in the hand game. In this task, children…

A total of 69 preschool children were tested on measures of false belief understanding (the Unexpected Transfer task), inhibitory control (the Grass/Snow task), and strategic reasoning (the Windows task). For each task, children indicated their response either by pointing with their index finger or by using a nonstandard response mode (pointing…

Understanding how responses become prepotent is essential for understanding when inhibitory control is needed in everyday behavior. The authors investigated the conditions under which manual actions became prepotent in a go/no-go task. Children had to open boxes that contained stickers on go trials and leave shut boxes that were empty on no-go…

Understanding how responses become prepotent is essential for understanding when inhibitory control is needed in everyday behaviour. We investigated prepotency in the grass-snow task--in which a child points to a green card when the experimenter says "snow" and a white card when the experimenter says "grass". Experiment 1 (n =…

Go/no-go tasks seem to provide a simple marker of inhibitory development in young children. Children are told to respond to one stimulus on go trials but to make no response to another stimulus on no-go trials; responding on no-go trials is assumed to reflect a failure to inhibit the go response. However, there is evidence to suggest that a type…

In the present experiment, we used a reversed-contingency paradigm (the windows task: [Russell, J., Mauthner, N., Sharpe, S., & Tidswell, T. (1991). The windows task as a measure of strategic deception in preschoolers and autistic subjects. "British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9," 331-349]) to explore the effect of alterations in the task…

In a recent study Diamond, Kirkham and Amso (2002) obtained evidence consistent with the claim that the day-night task requires inhibition because the picture and its corresponding conflicting response are semantically related. In their study children responded more accurately in a dog-pig condition (see /day picture/ say "dog"; see /night…

Gerstadt, Hong, and Diamond (1994) investigated the development of inhibitory control in children aged 3 1/2 - 7 years using the day-night task. In two studies we build on Gerstadt et al.'s findings with a measure of inhibitory control that can be used throughout childhood. In Study 1 (twenty-four 3 1/2-year-olds and sixteen 5-year-olds) we…