Publications

Although a growing body of work has established developing regulatory abilities during the second year of life, more work is needed to better understand factors that influence this emerging control. The purpose of the present study was to examine regulation capacities in executive functions (i.e., EF or cognitive control) and emotion regulation (i.e., ER or control focused on modulating negative and sustaining positive emotions) in a Latin American sample, with a focus on how joint attention, social vulnerability, and temperament contribute to performance. Sixty Latin American dyads of mothers and children aged 18 to 24 months completed several EF tasks, a Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) to examine ER (Weinberg et al., 2008), and the Early Social Communication Scale to measure joint attention (Mundy et al., 2003). Parents completed the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire Very Short Form to measure temperament (ECBQ-VS, Putnam et al., 2010) and the Social Economic Level Scale (SES) from INDEC (2000). Results revealed the typical responses expected for toddlers of this age in these EF tasks and in the SFP. Also, we found associations between EF and ER and between non-verbal communication related to monitoring infants attention to objects (i.e., responding to joint attention) and initiation of pointing (e.g., pointing and showing of an object while the child alternates his gaze to an adult) with EF. Regarding social factors, family differences and type of housing contribute to regulation. For temperament, effortful control was associated with both regulatory capacities. Finally, only age predicted EF. These results suggest that many patterns regarding the development of these abilities are duplicated in the first months of life in a Latin American sample while further highlighting the importance of considering how the environment and the individual characteristics of infants may associate to these regulatory abilities, which is particularly relevant to developing public policies to promote their optimal development.

Several theories of executive function (EF) propose that EF development corresponds to children s ability to form representations and reflect on represented stimuli in the environment. However, research on early EF is primarily conducted with preschoolers, despite the fact that important developments in representation (e.g., language, gesture, shared joint attention) occur within the 1st years of life. In the present study, EF performance and the relationship between EF and early representation (i.e., joint attention, language) were longitudinally examined in 47 children at 14 and 18 months of age. Results suggest that the 2nd year of life is a distinct period of EF development in which children exhibit very little coherence or stability across a battery of EF tasks. However, by 18 months, a subset of child participants consistently passed the majority of EF tasks, and superior EF performance was predicted by 14-month representational abilities (i.e., language comprehension and some episodes of initiating joint attention). This research suggests that the transition from foundational behavioral control in infancy to the more complex EF observed in preschool is supported by representational abilities in the 2nd year of life.

There is scant evidence that children younger than 7 years show a memory advantage for distinct information, a memory phenomenon termed the isolation effect (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2001, Vol. 27, pp. 1359-1366). We investigated whether 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds developing organizational processing and executive function contributed to the isolation effect, demonstrated when recall was better for a semantically unique target (e.g., sheep, pig, watermelon, duck) rather than a semantically common target (e.g., apple, banana, watermelon, strawberry). To encourage organizational processing, children were asked to categorize each item presented. Children also completed working memory and cognitive flexibility tasks, and only children who scored high in cognitive flexibility demonstrated the isolation effect.