A Developmental Research On The Executive Function Of The 6-11-year-old Children

Executive function possibly has close affinities with many higher mental functions of humanity. It is the mental process that the organism controls the thought and the activity deliberately and has something to do with the development of various abilities such as attention, rule application, mental theory and working memory . It is of great theoretic and practical significance for us to learn the developmental process of cognitive regulation of humanity and that human brain how to complete complicated cognition mission etc. Executive function developmental research currently mainly concentrated at the whole life development and adult stage. Some researches indicate that the whole life development of executive function is a inverse U curve (Dempster,1992).The researcher is still very limited to the research of the complicated cognition function owing to the executive function is the conjunct operation result of the normalized prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain. The domestic and international researches have already revealed that 3 to 4 years old is an important period that the children develop their executive function. But the research of the primary school stage is now infrequent and doesn't reach a unitive conclusion. Furthermore there are few researches of different dimensional development regulation currently. Using the classification of the Miyake and Collette& Linden, this research opens out the executive function development status of the 6-11- year-old children through shifting,updating,inhibition and other components.This research adopts the classic mission (such as the types of Stroop and the N-back etc.) of the domestic and international research to start experiment. To measure the development regulations of shifting,updating and inhibition,two kinds of representative mission are selected for each component. Three components i.e. shifting,updating and inhibition are investigated how to develop from 6 to 11 years old in this research according to the performance of 180 6-11-year-old children who complete the mission of the executive function components.As a whole, executive function develops quickly from 6 to 8 years old, however it presents a characteristic of developing slowly during 9 to 11. As to inhibition components,the color phrase Stroop age main effect doesn't show significance of the 6-11- year-old children. In the numerical Stroop,respondents present more consistent result with Levin and Williams et al's researches (1999) in the inhibition dimension,Namely 6-8 years old is one of the critical periods for the normal children that their inhibitory reaction ability develop quickly. In the shifting dimension investigation, through variance analysis,it's discovered that either completing more-odd shifting or verbal shifting mission,6 to 7 years old is one of the critical periods for conversional dimension of executive function while it develops gently during 8 to 11 years old. The critical periods of N-back and keep track updating are both between 6 to 8 years old,but from 9 until 11 years old, development of this ability doesn't show significance.Now we can safely draw a conclusion:In general the executive function of children put up a growing trend with the age growth;The different executive function components express different development velocity,the updating ability has two fast development periods among them are 6-7 and 8-9 years old. The fast development period of inhibition and shifting are 7-9 years old;No gender main effect are found in all the executive function mission measures,and the interaction between age and gender doesn't show significance either.