Multisensory stimuli enhance 3-year-old children's executive function: A three-dimensional object version of the standard Dimensional Change Card Sort.

A three-dimensional object version of the standard Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) was developed to examine the influence of multisensory stimuli on 3-year-old children's executive function. Whereas the developmental phenomenon marking 3-year-olds' difficulties with rule use in the standard DCCS can be attributed to several cognitive factors, we examined the possibility that better encoding of object features could facilitate children's rule-switching behavior. We examined whether 3-year-olds might be able to capitalize on cues available to multiple senses to create a more robust representation of object features that would enable them to overcome previous difficulties with rule switching in the standard DCCS.