Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado at Boulder, Muenzinger D244, 345 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0345, United States.
Cognition. 2010 Aug;116(2):155-67. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.04.007. Epub 2010 May 15.
A fundamental part of growing up is going beyond routines. Children become increasingly skilled over the first years of life at actively maintaining goals in the service of flexible behavior, allowing them to break out of habits and switch from one task to another. Their early successes often occur with exogenous (externally-provided) goals, and only later with endogenous (internally-driven) goals--a developmental progression that may reflect the greater demands on selection processes inherent in deciding what to do. Three studies investigated the mechanisms supporting endogenous flexibility, using a verbal fluency task in which children generated members of a category and could decide on their own when to switch from one subcategory to another. Children's verbal fluency related to their performance in a more constrained and well-established switching task (Experiment 1), suggesting that the more complex verbal fluency measure taps the flexibility processes of interest. Children's verbal fluency was also linked to their abstract, categorical representations in both individual difference analyses (Experiment 2) and experimental manipulation (Experiment 3). We interpret these results in terms of the role of abstract representations in reducing selection demands to aid the development of endogenous control.
成长的一个基本部分是超越常规。在生命的最初几年，儿童在积极地为灵活行为服务的过程中，不断提高维持目标的技能，从而能够打破习惯，从一项任务切换到另一项任务。他们早期的成功往往是在外源性（外部提供）目标的帮助下实现的，而只有在后来才是内源性（内部驱动）目标的帮助下实现的——这种发展进程可能反映了在决定做什么时，内在选择过程的要求更高。三项研究使用言语流畅性任务来探究支持内源性灵活性的机制，在该任务中，儿童生成一个类别中的成员，并且可以自行决定何时从一个子类别切换到另一个子类别。在更具约束性和更成熟的切换任务中，儿童的言语流畅性与他们的表现相关（实验 1），这表明更复杂的言语流畅性测量方法可以反映出感兴趣的灵活性过程。在个体差异分析（实验 2）和实验操作（实验 3）中，儿童的言语流畅性也与他们的抽象、类别化表示相关。我们根据抽象表示在减少选择需求方面的作用来解释这些结果，以帮助发展内源性控制。
