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A new measure for assessing executive function across a wide age range: children and adults find happy‐sad more difficult than day‐night
Author(s) -
Lagattuta Kristin Hansen,
Sayfan Liat,
Monsour Michael
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00994.x
Subject(s) - psychology , measure (data warehouse) , developmental psychology , function (biology) , cognitive psychology , database , evolutionary biology , computer science , biology
Two experiments examined 4‐ to 11‐year‐olds’ and adults’ performance (N = 350) on two variants of a Stroop‐like card task: the day‐night task (say ‘day’ when shown a moon and ‘night’ when shown a sun) and a new happy‐sad task (say ‘happy’ for a sad face and ‘sad’ for a happy face). Experiment 1 featured colored cartoon drawings. In Experiment 2, the happy‐sad task featured photographs, and pictures for both measures were grayscale. All age groups made more errors and took longer to respond to the happy‐sad versus the day‐night versions. Unlike the day‐night task, the happy‐sad task did not suffer from ceiling effects, even in adults. The happy‐sad task provides a methodological advance for measuring executive function across a wide age range.