Executive Functioning

The First study by Calero et al, uses ToM suite of tasks introduced by Wellman and Liu, which investigated age and gender dependant development of ToM tasks in 6 to 8 years old children. The study used 36 first grade and 40 second graders comprised of 42 boys and 34 girls aged from 6 to 8 years ( average 86.5 months). Standardised questionnaires were used to collect data on temperament and family data. Two experimenters administered the test in a quite room by means of a game in a computer platform to eliminate any external influences and biases. Wellman and Liu's ToM suite of tasks consisted of six areas however scaling was only tests on 4 (DD, DB, KA, and FB). A non-parametric permutation test was performed to produced a surrogate version of the data which helped determine the importance level of the results, however, unpredictability is present as the point at which kids will start failing is unknown. This is an important finding because it shows that even having the previous task information will not help in predicting the outcome of the next. This is also confirmed in the 2 comparisons of Pointwise and Markov models and Markov and the Cumulative model tests. By introducing this novel method to quantify the scaling property of the suite they were able to Corroborate the findings of Wellman and Liu (2004) and further prove their hypothesis that ToM progression is still be present in 6 to 8-years old. However further study is required as ToM suite of tasks were not tested in the original study. It was also proven that there was a high probability that girls perform much better than boys for all ToM tasks in the 6-8 year old range. Lastly, the study was not able to prove or disprove the hypothesis that family backgrounds and older siblings influence ToM and the area of exposure and experiences of pretend play and talk about feelings requires further research and data collection to be more conclusive.

The aim of the second Study by Boelema et al. was to longitudinally investigate differential maturation of 6 sub functions (outlined in Table 1) of Executive Functioning (EF) during in early and late adolescence taking sex and socioeconomic status (SES) differences into account. Verbal task instructions were given to a large number of early and late adolescences and before each task both speed and accuracy of performance were emphasized. The study used a computerized set of tasks which guaranteed a standardized assessment of reaction