| Inhibitory control involves being able to control one’s attention,behavior,thoughts,and/or emotions to override a strong internal predisposition or external lure,and instead do what’s more appropriate or needed.As one of the core EFs,inhibitory control is very important for the children’s cognitive development and social adaption.The preschool period is crucial for inhibitory control to develop.It is helpful to find the best time of training and significant to optimize children’s brain mechanism through verifying development tendency,function and training measures of inhibitory control.The limitations of previous study are as follows.Firstly,the present tasks of inhibitory control are too easy for elder preschool children to reflect their real level because of ceiling effect,which inferred that the developmental tendency is likely to underestimate development speed of children at the end of preschool.What’s more,some studies found that inhibitory control of preschool children significantly predicted academic skills such as mathematical calculation,language consciousness,vocabulary knowledge,etc.And its effect on mathematics was stronger than another two elements of executive function: working memory and cognitive flexibility.But some studies found that working memory had the stronger effects on academic skills than inhibitory control.And the effects of inhibitory control with varying degrees of complexity were not considered in those studies.Besides,cross sectional approach is used in previous study,which is unable to control the effects of early academic skills and analyze independent predictive effects of inhibitory control.Finally,the present intervention training of inhibitory control needs to be improved: 1.The training games lack of combined training of inhibitory control and other elements of executive function;2.The training games lack of adapting difficulty;3.Supplementary conditions such as game environment and participation motivation to guarantee implementation of training are not brought into full play;4.Innovative improvements such as attention to group cooperation,increase in metacognition,provision of immediate feedback need to be further verified.This paper involves three studies to examine the developmental tendency and the predictive effects on early academic skills of inhibitory control with varying degrees of complexity,and to examine the effects of improved training program of group behavior games.The purpose of the first study is to examine the developmental tendency of inhibitory control with varying degrees of complexity,and two sub-studies are involved.Study A: Tracking tests on 3~6 years-old children were conducted twice with the interval of nine months.The experimental design included three factors,which was 2(types of task: the day-night task without nested rules,the day-night task with nested rules)×2(test time: T1,T2)×4(age groups: 3.00~3.75,3.76~4.50,4.51~5.25,5.26~6.00).Study B: Tracking tests on 3~5 years-old children were conducted three times with the interval of nine months and fifteen months respectively.The experimental design included three factors,which was 2(types of task: the day-night task without nested rules,the day-night task with nested rules)×3(test time: T1,T2,T3)×2(age groups: 3.00~3.99,4.00~4.99).Task type and test time factors are within-subjects factors,and the age factor is between-subjects factor.The results are as the follows: Firstly,the inhibitory control based on the day-night task with nested rules is more difficult than the inhibitory control based on the day-night task without nested rules for preschool children.Secondly,inhibitory control with varying degrees shows different developmental tendency.In the preschool stage from 3 to 6 years-old,the less complex inhibitory control increases fast at the beginning and then slows down.However,the more complex inhibitory control keeps up a steady increase during 3 to 6 years-old.Implications: 1.Difficulty level of tasks should be considered in the study of developmental tendency of inhibitory control,for tasks with high passing rate will lead underestimation of growth rate of elder children’s inhibitory control.2.Difficulty level of tests should be considered in the study of predictive effects of inhibitory control on early academic skills,for the lower the difficulty,the insufficient of partition degree,which leads to underestimation of predictive effects of inhibitory control.The purpose of the second study is to examine the predictive effects of inhibitory control with varying degrees of complexity on speech comprehension and mathematical cognition in later period,and verify the stronger predictive effects of inhibitory control than working memory and cognitive flexibility.Study A: Age and working memory were controlled,predictive effects on speech comprehension and mathematical cognition were examined 9 months later and 15 months later.Results indicate that more complex inhibitory control obviously predicts speech comprehension,amount and quantitative relation and total points of mathematical cognition after 9 months,and amount and quantitative relation after 15 months.Less complex inhibitory control only predicts total points of mathematical cognition after 15 months.Study B: Age and early academic skills were controlled,predictive effects of inhibitory control,working memory and cognitive flexibility on after 6 months were analyzed and compared.Results show that: More complex inhibitory control obviously predicts total points of speech comprehension,amount and quantitative relation and mathematical cognition after 6 months.However,less complex inhibitory control only predicts shape and spatial relationship.Independent predictive effects of working memory and cognitive flexibility on speech comprehension and mathematical cognition in later period are not obvious.Conclusion: 1.Unlike working memory and cognitive flexibility,although age and early academic skills are controlled,predictive effects of inhibitory control on speech comprehension and mathematical cognition are still obvious.2.Predictive effects of more complex inhibitory control are stronger.The purpose of study three is to improve self-adaptive difficulty,timely feedback,metacognition,community,interestingness,and comprehensiveness in training program of inhibitory control and to examine the effects of training.The experimental design included experimental group and controlled group,which involves 24 children aged 4~5 received game training of 30 minutes,three time a week for 5 weeks,and immediate testing after training and delay testing after 3 months are also included.Findings: 1.Group game can obviously improve inhibitory control,working memory and cognitive flexibility in immediate testing after training,and inhibitory control,working memory,speech comprehension and mathematical cognition in delay testing.2.On tests of inhibitory control,group game cannot improve performance of children aged 4~5 in the day-night task without nested rules,but can improve their performance in the day-night task with nested rules,finger-fist task and stop signal task,which indicates that the improved group game has good training effects.In conclusion,inhibitory control with different complexity level has different developmental tendency and different predictive effects on academic skills,and reaches in different level after training.In the future study,testing task should be prudently selected to avoid false conclusion.Inhibitory control grows rapidly in period of preschool,and has crucial predictive effects on early academic skills,and can be improved by game training.Training on inhibitory control at preschool will help children to adapt to school and society in the future. |
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