The power of cultural habits: The role of effortless control in delaying gratification.

What factors lead children to delay gratification, holding out for larger rewards later instead of taking smaller rewards now? Traditionally, delay of gratification has been associated with effortful control and willpower. However, we propose that delay of gratification may be partially supported by effortless control employed through habits shaped within sociocultural contexts. Specifically, in sociocultural contexts where waiting is rewarding and socially valued, children are more likely to wait for larger, delayed rewards and to form associations between these contexts and waiting for rewards.

No evidence for cross-paradigm transfer of abstract task knowledge in adults and school-aged children.

Cognitive control is a hallmark of human cognition. A large number of studies have focused on the plasticity of cognitive control and examined how repeated task experience leads to the improvement of cognitive control in novel task environments. However, it has been demonstrated that training-induced changes are very selective and that transfer occurs within one task paradigm but not across different task paradigms.

When stimulus variability accelerates the learning of task knowledge in adults and school-aged children.

Experience with instances that vary in their surface features helps individuals to form abstract task knowledge, leading to transfer of that knowledge to novel contexts. The current study sought to examine the role of this variability effect in how adults and school-aged children learn to engage cognitive control. We focused on the engagement of cognitive control in advance (proactive control) and in response to conflicts (reactive control) in a cued task-switching paradigm, and conducted four preregistered online experiments with adults (Experiment 1A: N = 100, Experiment 1B: N = 105) and 9- to 10-year-olds (Experiment 2A: N = 98, Experiment 2B: N = 97).

Evidence for positive and negative transfer of abstract task knowledge in adults and school-aged children.

Engaging cognitive control is essential to flexibly adapt to constantly changing environments. However, relatively little is known about how prior task experience impacts on the engagement of cognitive control in novel task environments. We aimed to clarify how individuals learn and transfer the engagement of cognitive control with a focus on the hierarchical and temporal aspects of task knowledge.

Cultures Crossing: The Power of Habit in Delaying Gratification.

Resisting immediate temptations in favor of larger later rewards predicts academic success, socioemotional competence, and health. These links with delaying gratification appear from early childhood and have been explained by cognitive and social factors that help override tendencies toward immediate gratification. However, some tendencies may actually promote delaying gratification.