Focused but fixed: the impact of expectation of external rewards on inhibitory control and flexibility in preschoolers.

Promise of rewards has been widely used in controlling preschoolers' behaviors. The current study investigated how the expectation of receiving an external reward may influence preschoolers' executive function. Four- to 5-year-old Singaporean children were randomly assigned to reward-informed and reward-uninformed conditions.

Knowing minds, controlling actions: the developmental relations between theory of mind and executive function from 2 to 4 years of age.

This longitudinal study examined the concurrent and predictive relations between executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) in 82 preschoolers who were assessed when they were 2, 3, and 4 years old. The results showed that the concurrent relation between EF and ToM, after controlling for age, verbal ability, and sex, was significant at 3 and 4 years of age but not at 2 years of age. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that EF at age 2 significantly predicted ToM at age 3 and that EF at age 3 significantly predicted ToM at age 4, over and above the effects of age, verbal ability, and prior performance on ToM tasks.

The effects of parental scaffolding on preschoolers' executive function.

The present study explores the effects of parental scaffolding of children's problem solving on the development of executive function (EF). Eighty-two children were assessed at 2, 3, and 4 years of age on a variety of EF tasks and, at ages 2 and 3, on a problem-solving puzzle with which parents offered structured assistance (i.e.