Study On The Thermal Development Of Executive Function : Child Gambling Task

Executive function can be divided into a more purely cognitive aspect "cool" executive function and an aspect highly involved affect and motivation "hot" executive function. There has been growing interest in hot EF, as well—in particular in what might be called affective decision-making, or decision-making about events that have emotionally significant consequences (i.e., meaningful rewards and/or losses). The gambling paradigm is one of the most popular measures of affective decision-making. In the present research, 4 experiments examined the development of affective decision-making and hot executive function during the preschool period.Experiment 1 tested 60 children at 2 ages (3 and 4 years) using the Children's Gambling Task (Kerr & Zelazo, 2004). Results showed a significant age difference between 3- and 4-year-olds, indicating that affective decision-making develops rapidly between 3 and 4 years. On the other hand, a lot of variability in children's performance on this task might have obscured sex effects; therefore, sex difference was not statistically significant, though boys did better than girls on the last two blocks. These findings from Chinese children are generally consistent with the previous results, which indicates the development of affective decision-making in preschool period might have cross-cultural consistency between North American children and Chinese children.Seventy-six students of 7 years were tested in Experiment 2 to investigate whether the modification about the Children's Gambling task reduced the demands on children's inductive ability. Positive results were gained.Experiment 3 measured 181 children of 3, 4, and 5 years old using the modified version...