When Stroop helps Piaget: An inter-task positive priming paradigm in 9-year-old children

•Cognitive development in different domains is supported by inhibitory control.•We examined the generalizability of inhibitory control in 9-year-old children.•Children are faster on number-conservation items after incongruent Stroop items.•Inhibitory processes appear to generalize between verbal and non-verbal domains.

To determine whether inhibitory control is domain general or domain specific in school children, we asked 40 9-year-old children to perform an inter-task priming paradigm in which they responded to Stroop items on the primes and to Piaget number conservation items on the probes. The children were more efficient in the inhibition of a misleading “length-equals-number” heuristic in the number conservation task if they had successfully inhibited a previous prepotent reading response in the Stroop task. This study provides evidence that the inhibitory control ability of school children generalizes to distinct cognitive domains, that is, verbal for the Stroop task and logico-mathematical for Piaget’s number conservation task.