Impacts of exposure to television and types of animations on children’s task persistence

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of the duration of children’s exposure to television, the level of parental guidance during the exposure and the types of animations (realistic or unrealistic) on their task persistence. A total of ninety young children with a mean age of 60.1 months (SD = 5.89) participated in the study. The time the children spent on unsolvable puzzles was recorded as an indicator of task persistence. The children were randomly assigned to either a realistic animation group or an unrealistic animation group. Initially, the children were tested with an unsolvable puzzle as a pretest. They were given a posttest two weeks later. During the test, the realistic animation group watched a realistic animation and the unrealistic animation group watched an unrealistic animation before they were asked to work on another unsolvable puzzle. The same procedure was repeated with a follow-up test two weeks later. In the pretest, no significant difference among the independent variables emerged between the groups. Multiple regression between the posttest and the follow-up test pointed out children’s daily exposure to television as a predictor of a decrease in their task persistence. The finding places more emphasis on the duration of children’s exposure to television than parental guidance and the types of television programs.     

Inhibition in task switching: The reliability of the n − 2 repetition cost

The n???2 repetition cost seen in task switching is the effect of slower response times performing a recently completed task (e.g. an ABA sequence) compared to performing a task that was not recently completed (e.g. a CBA sequence). This cost is thought to reflect cognitive inhibition of task representations and as such, the n???2 repetition cost has begun to be used as an assessment of individual differences in inhibitory control; however, the reliability of this measure has not been investigated in a systematic manner. The current study addressed this important issue. Seventy-two participants performed three task switching paradigms; participants were also assessed on rumination traits and processing speed—measures of individual differences potentially modulating the n???2 repetition cost. We found significant n???2 repetition costs for each paradigm. However, split-half reliability tests revealed that this cost was not reliable at the individual-difference level. Neither rumination tendencies nor processing speed predicted this cost. We conclude that the n???2 repetition cost is not reliable as a measure of individual differences in inhibitory control.