Title: Cross-Cultural Study of Family Influences on Executive Functions in Late Childhood
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Recent advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience suggest a link between executive functions (EF) and school achievement, above and beyond the contributions of intelligence. Executive functions are often described as our ability to reason, plan ahead, multi-task or switch between tasks, sustain attention, delay gratification, and make complex decisions. Marked changes in EF occur between childhood and adulthood. Although children from Asia are widely reported to outperform children from North America and Europe on EF tasks (particularly on tests of inhibitory control and attention), the evidence is focused almost entirely on early childhood (e.g., 3- to 7-year-olds) and largely ignores the question of whether there are cross-cultural differences in EF for older children and adults. To date, these cross-cultural studies have assumed that EF tasks are culturally fair and index the same cognitive and social processes in children from different countries. In seeking to explain cultural contrasts in EF, existing studies have assumed (rather than directly measured) contrasts in parenting. In discussing these findings, the focus has been on contrasts in socialization goals (i.e., individual autonomy vs. collective harmony). It is possible that multiple factors contribute to between-country contrasts in children's social environments. In particular, to date cross-cultural studies have ignored potential differences in parental EF. Further, there is growing interest in the relation between EF and school achievement. Again, most of the research in this area has focused on early childhood and there are no existing studies attempting to explore the interplay between EF and academic achievement in a cross-cultural sample. Thus, the aim of the current study is to uniquely explore the EF skills and academic achievement in late childhood with children and parents from both the United Kingdom and Hong Kong to better understand the importance of family factors on EF development and its relation to school performance. The study outlined here will include parent-child dyads completing a fairly extensive assessment battery. The study focuses on late childhood with participants between the ages of 8 and 11 years. The test battery will include multiple measures of EF (i.e., working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and planning), other cognitive measures (i.e., verbal skills, general cognitive ability), parenting measures (socialization goals, quality of parent child-relationships) and academic ability (i.e. literacy and numeracy skills). In this way, EF will also shed light on the cultural universality / specificity of the correlates of variation in older children's EF, family factors and academic achievement. This collaborative venture promises to be fruitful as it brings together researchers from the Department of Psychology and the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge with diverse areas of expertise (e.g., experimental task design for online testing, cognitive assessments, psychometrics, etc.). In addition, by partnering with researchers in the Departments of Psychology and Educational Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the applicants are well placed to ensure that policy-relevant findings are disseminated efficiently to educational practitioners in Hong Kong.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH