The Marshmallow Test and Executive Functions
One treat now—or two if I wait. That's the choice young kids have to make when they're taking the Marshmallow Test, a famous measure of how well children can delay gratification. It...
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Executive function skills really all work in concert. The working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility can be really difficult to disentangle. The natural course of executive function development is to improve gradually across the, particularly early preschool years, and to peak not until one's, you know, early to mid twenties. We know that executive function and brain development are highly plastic during these two periods of development in preschool, as well as pre-adolescence. The Marshmallow Test is a measure of delay of gratification. The nature of the experiment is to give children a choice between a smaller reward now and a larger reward later. So in the classic paradigm, children would be offered something like one marshmallow now, or...
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Executive function skills really all work in concert. The working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility can be really difficult to disentangle. The natural course of executive function development is to improve gradually across the, particularly early preschool years, and to peak not until one's, you know, early to mid twenties. We know that executive function and brain development are highly plastic during these two periods of development in preschool, as well as pre-adolescence. The Marshmallow Test is a measure of delay of gratification. The nature of the experiment is to give children a choice between a smaller reward now and a larger reward later. So in the classic paradigm, children would be offered something like one marshmallow now, or...
