{"pk":26795,"title":"Executive function and attention predict low-income preschoolers’active category learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Recent studies find that school-age children learn better whenthey have active control during study. Yet little is knownabout how individual differences in strategy or cognitive con-trol skills may affect active learning for preschoolers, nor ifexperimental measures of active learning map onto real-worldlearning outcomes. The current study assesses 101 low-income5-year-olds on an active category learning task, and measuresof executive function, attention, and school readiness. We findthat preschoolers use an informative sampling strategy for cat-egories defined by stimuli features in 1D and when presentedwith a distractor dimension (2D). Children accurately classifyin 1D, but show mixed performance in 2D. Attention predictssampling accuracy, and working memory and inhibitory con-trol predict classification accuracy. Performance in the activelearning task predicts early math and pre-literacy skills. Thesefindings suggest that trial-by-trial learning decisions may re-veal insight into how cognitive control skills support the ac-quisition of knowledge.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"active learning; executive function; attention; cog-nitive development; education"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43t3d08c","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Katherine","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Adams","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University,Radboud University,Donders Institute for Brain","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26795/galley/16431/download/"}]}