A measure of conflict inhibition in toddlers: the animal-vehicle task

Abstract

Despite the recent increase in the number of age-appropriate cognitive tasks for very young children, their paucity is still obvious. Inhibitory abilities emerge very early in life but the research generally focuses on the preschool years because of the deficiency of tasks that are appropriate for toddlers. The present study was motivated by the fewness of age appropriate conflict inhibition (CI) tasks. Although its validity was not fully supported, the Animal-Vehicle Task (AVT) was presented as a CI task for toddlers in an earlier study. This study was an attempt to replicate and extend the earlier investigation of the AVT by considering the limitations of that study. In the present study, multiple criteria were used to evaluate the validity of the AVT as a CI task. Its relation to CI, working memory (WM) and simple delay (SD) was investigated. The AVT involves training toddlers to ‘hop’ animals and ‘push back-and-forth’ vehicles in the first part of the task (the single part). In the second part (the mixed part), eight further exemplars from each category are presented, this time in a mixed-order (random presentation) fashion and their reaction times (RTs) and errors for each trial were measured. The AVT was expected to be negatively correlated with CI and WM while none or moderate relation between the AVT and SD was anticipated. Forty-eight toddlers aged between 22 to 36 months were included in the study. The results showed that (1) the main finding of the previous study, the CI relation to the AVT could not be replicated, (2) as expected, performance of children who have a higher working memory capacity is affected less by mixing the two category exemplars, and (3) SD was not correlated with the AVT performance. The results also confirmed finding of the previous study that there are switch and mixing cost regarding the errors in the AVT. In conclusion, the AVT seems to be viable cognitive tasks that can be employed with toddlers but its validity needs further investigation.