New measures for hot executive function

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether two new preschool-friendly versions of Delayed Match to Sample (DMS) and Delayed Non-Match to Sample (DNMS) could be used as measures for hot executive function. Ninety-four children completed three tasks: match to sample tasks (DMS and DNMS), Preschool Gambling Task (PGT), and an empathy task. The findings of the study indicated that there was a significant age difference in the performance of children in both DMS and DNMS tasks where four-year-old children overall performed better on both the tasks. It was also found that children overall performed better on DMS when compared to DNMS, which suggested that children were good at learning the matching rule. The findings also indicated that both DMS and DNMS were associated with PGT. More specifically, DNMS was related to the learning phase (first 30 cards) of PGT, while the DMS was related to the awareness phase (last block) of PGT. These results indicated that ‘conceptual’ scores on DMS were predictive of PGT awareness scores and the ‘learning’ scores on DNMS were predictive of PGT learning of index. Therefore, it was concluded that the results were indicative of having two distinct processes of decision making. Finally, it was also found that DNMS and DMS were positively associated with the empathy task.