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Creative thinking is critical to overcome many daily life situations. As such, there has been a growing interest on how creative thinking develops during childhood. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms driving its development. Indeed, almost all research has focused on divergent thinking, leaving aside convergent thinking, and did not thoroughly investigate how internal and/or external factors influence their development. Here, 222 children aged from 4 to 12 years old attending either a Montessori or a traditional school performed drawing-based convergent and divergent standardized tasks. In addition, a subset of 41 children were tested using similar tasks for a second session 3 years apart. The results revealed dynamic developmental stages of convergent and divergent thinking. More specifically, a loss of divergent thinking was counterbalanced by a gain of convergent thinking, especially during the fourth-grade slump (8--10 years old). Although Montessori-schooled children showed overall higher creative abilities than traditionally schooled children, no differences were observed in the developmental trajectories of convergent and divergent thinking between the two pedagogies. This suggests that progress and decrease in creative thinking may be mostly due to internal factors such as brain maturation factors than external factors such as peer pressure.

Cognitive control (also referred to as executive functions) corresponds to a set of cognitive processes that support the goal-directed regulation of thoughts and actions. It plays a major role in complex activities and predicts later academic achievement. Importantly, while growing up, children are progressively transitioning from engaging cognitive control in an externally driven fashion, i.e., relying on external guidance, to exerting it self-directedly, i.e., autonomously determining when and how to engage it. Although growing self-directedness in cognitive control engagement is critical to autonomy gains during childhood, relatively little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Incorporating previous main proposals in cognitive control development, we propose that self-directed control development is driven by the ability to identify relevant goals, facilitated through accumulated knowledge on how to engage cognitive control with age. Importantly, we argue that there are two key processes that are part of successful goal identification: context-tracking and goal selection. We argue that most developmental changes are linked to context-tracking as the demands on this process are particularly high in self-directed situations. We then derived main predictions from this theoretical model as well as promising future directions.

Gaining autonomy is a key aspect of growing up and cognitive control development across childhood. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in an autonomous (or self-directed) fashion. Here, we propose that in order to successfully engage self-directed control, children identify, and achieve goals by tracking contextual information and using this information to select relevant tasks. To disentangle the respective contributions of these processes, we manipulated the difficulty of context-tracking via altering the presence or absence of contextual support (Study 1) and the difficulty of task selection by varying task difficulty (a)symmetry (Study 2) in 5-6 and 9-10-year-olds, and adults. Results suggested that, although both processes contribute to successful self-directed engagement of cognitive control, age-related progress mostly relates to context-tracking.

The development of executive function (EF) has been linked to various life outcomes, motivating intense research on the topic. While much of this research has focused on more thoroughly understanding age‐related changes of the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms involved, recent theoretical and empirical works have stressed how the immediate physical and social context plays an important role in how children engage in control. Recent studies have shown that the experimenter is an important variable modulating how children engage EF. In this article, I argue that this social presence should be examined more thoroughly to understand the influence of the research context on assessing EF in children. However, this examination should not neglect the fact that the presence of others and the interactions with them likely shape the development of EF in the long run, with important interindividual differences. Examining how others affect children's development of EF can have important implications, such as better reproducibility of studies' findings and theoretical conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging cognitive control supports increasingly efficient goal-directed behaviors. With age, children are increasingly expected to decide autonomously and with little external aid which goals to attain. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in such a self-directed fashion. The present study examined self-directed control development by adapting the voluntary task switching paradigm--the gold standard measure of this control form in adults--for use with 5-6-year-old and 9-10-year-old children. Overall, p(switch) suggested that even younger children can engage self-directed control successfully. However, other measures showed they struggled with task selection. Specifically, compared with older children and adults, they relied more on systematic strategies which reduced the cost of task selection, even when the strategy involved switching more often. Like externally driven control, self-directed control relies critically on task selection processes. These two forms of control likely form a continuum rather than two discrete categories.

Group membership is a strong driver of everyday life in humans, influencing similarity judgments, trust choices, and learning processes. However, its ontogenetic development remains to be understood. This study investigated how group membership, age, sex, and identification with a team influenced 39- to 60-month-old children (N = 94) in a series of similarity, trust, and learning tasks. Group membership had the most influence on similarity and trust tasks, strongly biasing choices toward in-groups. In contrast, prior experience and identification with the team were the most important factors in the learning tasks. Finally, overimitation occurred most when the children's team, but not the opposite, displayed meaningless actions. Future work must investigate how these cognitive abilities combine during development to facilitate cultural processes.

Task selection and task execution are key constructs in cognitive control development. Yet, little is known about how separable they are and how each contributes to task switching performance. Here, 60 4‐ to 5‐year olds, 60 7‐ to 8‐year olds, and 60 10‐ to 11‐year olds children completed the double registration procedure, which dissociates these two processes. Task selection yielded both mixing and switch costs, especially in younger children, and task execution mostly yielded switch costs at all ages, suggesting that task selection is costlier than task execution. Moreover, both task selection and execution varied with task self‐directedness (i.e., to what extent the task is driven by external aids) demands. Whereas task selection and task execution are dissociated regarding performance costs, they nevertheless both contribute to self‐directed control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]