Inhibitory Control in Preschool Children. An investigation of age, gender and socioeconomic differences.
Year: 2020
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The present study aims to investigate individual differences in children’s inhibitory control firstly by attempting to answer whether we can replicate the findings of age differences in a sample of Norwegian 3-5-year-olds. Secondly, the study seeks to investigate whether children’s gender is related to their inhibitory control performance, and thirdly whether socioeconomic characteristics of parents’ income and education contribute to variation in the children’s performances. A sample of 208 preschoolers (N = 115 girls, 34-71 months) were assessed utilizing a variation of the Day-/Night task by Gerstadt et al. (1994), which is a broadly used tool for measuring inhibitory control in preschoolers, providing different outcome measures of task accuracy and time spent on the task. Details about parental socioeconomic status were collected through the Norwegian Statistics Bank (Statistics Norway, 2020). The data were analyzed by conducting a set of hierarchical multiple regression analyses. The study revealed significant improvements in children’s inhibitory control skills over the preschool period and that boys were faster on the task than girls even if not more accurate. Although, socioeconomic disparities were not related to inhibitory control scores in and of itself, girls from higher SES seemed to be at a disadvantage when it came to time spent on the task. Overall, the Day-/Night task can be a valuable resource of information about the development of children’s inhibitory control. Results from the task can highlight preschoolers’ improvement in inhibition with age and might effectively help specialists identify those children who are at risk. The current study suggests that this task can also be useful in a Norwegian context.
Author: Diamantia Floratou
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3110858598