Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
5039865 | Journal of Experimental Child Psychology | 2018 | 20 Pages |
Abstract
It is often assumed that children show reduced or absent inhibition of distracting material due to pending cognitive maturation, although empirical findings do not provide strong support for the idea of an “inhibitory deficit” in children. Most of this evidence, however, is based on findings from the negative priming paradigm, which confounds distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval processes. To resolve this confound, we adopted a sequential distractor repetition paradigm of Giesen, Frings, and Rothermund (2012), which provides independent estimates of distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval processes. Children (aged 7-9Â years) and young adults (aged 18-29Â years) identified centrally presented target fruit stimuli among two flanking distractor fruits that were always response incompatible. Children showed both reliable distractor inhibition effects as well as robust episodic retrieval effects of distractor-response bindings. Age group comparisons suggest that processes of distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval are already present and functionally intact in children and are comparable to those of young adults. The current findings highlight that the sequential distractor repetition paradigm of Giesen et al. (2012) is a versatile tool to investigate distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval separately and in an unbiased way and is also of merit for the examination of age differences with regard to these processes.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities
Psychology
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Authors
Carina Giesen, Francesca Weissmann, Klaus Rothermund,