2018, Vol.31, No.1

THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.67

pISSN : 1229-0718 / eISSN : 2671-6542
https://journal.kci.go.kr/baldal

Cognitive flexibility and proactive control have been considered to play important roles in the sentence processing abilities of preschoolers. In particular, sequential congruency effect measured from a flanker task not only reflects flexible thinking but also taps into proactive control to spontaneously monitor and maintain upcoming goals. The present study attempted to extend prior findings by examining whether proactive control is also an underlying ability that affects 4-5-year-old children’s sentence processing. To examine this, a sentence act-out task, Receptive Expressive Vocabulary Test - Receptive, a verbal fluency task, a go/no-go task, a Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task, an auditory working memory task, and a flanker task were administered to 4-5-year-olds. The results demonstrated that sequential congruency effect is indeed a significant predictor of the sentence processing ability after child’s age, vocabulary, working memory, and inhibitory ability are controlled for. However, no direct relationship was observed between proactive control and sentence processing measures. The potential role of proactive control is discussed in light of limitations in using a verbal fluency task for its measurement among preschoolers.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the effect of category label, properties and visual appearance on children’s reasoning during inductive inference and categorization. A property inference task and a categorization task were used to examine the effects of category label and properties. The results based on the data collected from 71 4-and 5-year-old children and 20 adults indicated that the participants’ reasoning was more category-based during the property inference task than during the categorization task. However, this tendency was not significant when the properties were highly familiar. Perceptual cues played a strong role in the categorization task when categorizing arbitrary categories compared to natural categories, but this was not the case during the property inference task. The results also showed that older participants tended to use conceptual information (category labels and properties) more than did younger participants, regardless of tasks and domains. These findings indicate that category labels have higher inductive potential compared to properties in human reasoning, and that even young children may consider conceptual information as main information that may override other factors, such as perceptual similarity.

Positivity effect, which is a bias toward positive information rather than negative, appears during old age. Prior studies have demonstrated positivity effects in the initial attention process by presenting positive stimuli with processing goals or clues and have studied the effect of those positivity effects on item memory. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to investigate whether positivity effects are also found in attentional bias to distractors and 2) to study whether the attentional bias influences a subsequent associative memory task. Both young (aged 20-25 years) and older (aged 61-85 years) adults participated in this study. Older adults showed initial attentional capture effects to the positive distractor after four seconds, confirming the positivity effect in older adults. Further, older adults performed better on the association memory task for happy faces. In sum, this study demonstrated older adults' attentional bias toward positive emotional information by dividing the attention process into attention capture and holding for the first time. Moreover, we found a positivity effect in the subsequent associative memory through incidental learning.