Prefrontal Cortex and Early Child Development

1. Prefrontal Cortex and Early Child Development Adele Diamond PhD, FRSC Canada Research Chair Tier 1 Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience University of British Columbia (UBC) adele.diamond@ubc.ca

2. “Executive Functions” (EFs), which depend on prefrontal cortex, are comprised of 3 core abilities:

3. Inhibitory control (self-control) • the ability to resist a strong • inclination to do one thing • and • instead do what is most appropriate or needed

4. Being able to… (1) pay attention despite distraction e.g., suppressing attention to what others are saying or to other visible items besides what’s most relevant such as screening out all but one voice at a cocktail party SELECTIVE or FOCUSED ATTENTION

5. Being able to… (2) stay on task despite boredom, initial failure, interesting tangents,or tempting distractions such as resisting the temptation to do something more fun and instead finish what you started DISCIPLINE

6. Evidence shows that discipline accounts for over twice as much variance in final grades as does IQ, even in college. (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005)

7. You may not be able to change your IQ, but you can certainly affect how much effort and discipline you exert. Discipline can be trained.

8. Being able to… (3) inhibit acting impulsively& instead make a more considered response enables you to: resist grabbing another child’s toy resist saying something socially inappropriate (or hurtful) resist ‘tit for tat’ (hurting someone because that person hurt you) resist jumping to an interpretation of what something must have meant or why it was done resist a luscious dessert when dieting

9. (b) Working Memory: Holding information in mind while mentally working it

10. Working memory is critical for making sense of anything that unfolds over time, for that always requires holding in mind what happened earlier & relating that to what is happening now. but… WM is ephemeral, like writing on fogged-up glass.

11. such as  relating one idea to another relating what you read (or learned / heard) earlier to what you are reading (learning / hearing) now understanding cause and effect doing mental arithmetic (e.g., adding or subtracting) following a conversation while keeping in mind what you want to say

12. (c) COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY being able to easily & quickly switch perspectives or the focus of attention, flexibly adjusting to changed demands or priorities, being able to think outside the box.

13. COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY is critical to creative problem-solving. What are other ways I can react when something happens? What are other ways I can conceptualize a problem (e.g., perhaps it is an opportunity)? What are other ways I can try to overcome a problem?

14. We can also change the focus of our attention by changing whether we are focusing onwhat others are doing wrong to focusingon how we might be contributing to that or how we might make the best of it.

15. Traditional IQ tests only assess executive functions to a very minimal extent. If I gave you a frontal lobotomy, you would still score in the 80’s or the 90’s on a traditional IQ test (i.e., with the normal range).

16. IQ Scores (Stanford-Binet) 120 110 100 90 80 70 60 0 PKU children with higher Phe levels (6-10 mg/dl) PKU children with less elevated Phe levels (2-6 mg/dl)

17. THE DAY-NIGHT TASK (Gerstadt , Hong, & Diamond, 1994) Semantically conflicting labels “Night” “Day” Requires holding 2 rules in mind, and inhibiting saying what the images really represent, saying the opposite instead.

18. Day-Night Stroop-like Task 100 90 80 Norms Matched Controls Percent Correct Siblings 70 Low Phe High Phe 60 50 Diamond et al. (1997) Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 40 4.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 Age in Years

19. Executive Function skills are more important for school readiness than are IQ or entry-level reading or math. (e.g., Blair, 2002; 2003; Blair & Razza, 2007; Normandeau & Guay, 1998)

20. Prediction of Math in Kindergarten *p < .05, **p < .01 From Blair & Razza (2007) Child Development.

21. Prediction of Math in Kindergarten *p < .05, **p < .01 From Blair & Razza (2007) Child Development.

22. Many children begin school having very poor EF skills.

23. Research shows that 5-year-olds today are behind in EFs compared with 5-year-olds of a couple of generationsago. (Smirnova, 1998;Smirnova & Gudareva, 2004)

24. Kindergarten children at risk because of economic disadvantage are disproportionately behind in EF relative to other cognitive skills and relative to children from middle- income homes.

25. Executive Functions are also important for school success. Working memory and inhibitory control each independently predict both math and reading competence throughout the school years.

27. Want to be able to use PFC whenever you… .. are presented with the unexpected, .. need to think outside the box, .. need to concentrate particularly hard, .. need to adapt to change… BUT

28. Want most tasks to be so familiar and well learned that PFC is NOT needed. Instead, those tasks are handed off to subcortical regions that have had 100,000s of more years of evolutionary time to perfect their functioning and can subserve task performance ever so much more efficiently than can PFC. (re:Zen and the Art of Archery)

29. The DLPFCSlice for8 Individuals(A/P=+45) NS RB MT TT DO CB KO DC R L

30. How can young children be helped to develop EF abilities?

31. The Tools of the Mind program is based on theories of Vygotsky and Luria Elena Bodrova & Deborah Leong

32. Vygotsky: Engaging in social pretend play is critical for developing executive function skills in very young children. It is emphasized in Tools of the Mind.

33. During social pretend play, children must hold their own role and those of others in mind (working memory) • inhibit acting out of character (employ inhibitory control), and • flexibly adjust to twists and turns in the evolving plot (cognitive flexibility) • -- all three of the core executive functions thus get exercise.

34. Deb and Elena tried EF activities as a module, added onto a curriculum. They found that children improved on what they practiced in the module, but the benefits did not transfer to other contexts or other EF skills.

35. They found that for benefits to generalize to other contexts and other EF skills, supports for, training in, and challenges to EF needed to be embedded in all aspects of the school day.

36. Buddy Reading

37. vs. what teachers usually do: - avoid problem situations - provide external control - scold for lack of control

39. THE DAY-NIGHT TASK (Gerstadt , Hong, & Diamond, 1994) Semantically conflicting labels “Night” “Day” Requires holding 2 rules in mind, and inhibiting saying what the images really represent, saying the opposite instead.

40. DITTY Experimenter sings a little ditty  think about the answer, don’t tell me  before the child responds. Imposes time between presentation of stimulus and response to make children take the time they need to ‘compute’ the answer

41. Percentage of Correct Responses by 4-Year-Old Children on the Song and Standard Conditions of the Day-Night Task 100% ~ 90% 80% 89% Chance 60% Percent Correct 56% 40% 20% 0% Song Standard

42. VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO

44. All children came from the same neighborhood and were randomly assigned to Tools or district-curriculum classrooms.

45. 1 or 2 Yrs of 1 Yr of 2 Yrs of District Curr. Tools Tools Mean age in years5.145.15 5.12 Percent Hispanic9391 91 Percent Male5541 51 % w/ family income <$25,000/year 7671 86 Avg yrs of mother's ed 1212 12 Ns per group6232 63 all were poor & at risk. all tested in their 2nd yr of presch.

46. Both conditions involved… • new programs, instituted at the same time. • the same books, classroom set-up, toys, & materials. • the same amount of in-classroom coaching support, same # of professional development hours, and same teacher stipends for attending workshops. • the same curricular content and covered the same topics. Teachers & assistants were randomly assigned to condi-tion by level of education (half of those w/ AA degrees & half w/ BAs were randomly assigned to each condition).

47. In evaluatingTools we specifically chose EF measures completely different from anything any of the children had ever done before. To see a difference by condition, the children would have to TRANSFER their training in EF to utterly new situations.

48. Percentage of Correct Responses on Reverse Flanker Trials 90 ~85% 85 80 75 70 65 Percent Correct 60 Chance 55 50 45 40 35 30 District Curriculum Tools of the Mind

49. Whether children were in Tools of the Mind or notaccounted for more variance in EF than did age or gender.

50. November 30, 2007 (Executive Functions)