Measuring the development of inhibitory control
Psychologists use a number of methods to measure the development of inhibitory control. One widely used technique is known as the Stroop task.Activity: The Stroop task
This activity allows you to do the Stroop task and gives you a way of experiencing prepotency directly.
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Now, out loud, and working as accurately and as a quickly as you can, call out the colour in which each word is written. What happens? Comment
You should find that after a few words you start to get confused, wanting to call out the word that you are reading, rather than the colour of the ink in which it is written. The meaning associated with the word is acting as a powerful prepotent stimulus. You have to inhibit everything you have learned about words and their meaning in order to call out the colour of the ink. You could take two measures of performance from this, each of which would give some information about inhibitory control: speed of completion, and number of errors made. Why do you think that this task is not suitable for children of, say, 3 years of age? The Stroop task tends to be used with older children and adults because of the demands it makes on literacy skills, which in themselves are not a component of executive function. Indeed young children’s limitations with respect to language processing pose a problem in finding age-appropriate executive function tasks. Children’s levels of verbal comprehension may influence their overallperformance on tasks that have complex instructions or written stimuli, and this decreases the validity of such tasks as measures of executive function.Consequently, tests for young children need to be kept as simple as possible. The Handgame and the Knock/Tap game are good examples of sometasks that have been designed to minimize the importance of written language skills. (You may also like to try a similar test, What's the animal?)
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