Charting early trajectories of executive control with the shape school.
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite acknowledgement of the importance of executive control for learning and behavior, there is a dearth of research charting its developmental trajectory as it unfolds against the background of children's sociofamilial milieus. Using a prospective, cohort-sequential design, this study describes growth trajectories for inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility across the preschool period in relation to child sex and sociofamilial resources. At ages 3, 3.75, 4.5, and 5.25 years, children (N = 388) from a broad range of social backgrounds were assessed using the Shape School, a graduated measure of executive control incorporating baseline, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility conditions. Measures of children's proximal access to learning resources and social network supports were collected at study entry. Findings revealed substantial gains in accuracy and speed for all Shape School conditions, these gains being particularly accelerated between ages 3 and 3.75 years. Improvements in inhibitory control were more rapid than those in flexible switching. Age-related differences in error and self-correction patterns on the Shape School also suggest qualitative changes in the underlying processes supporting executive performance across early childhood. Children from homes with fewer learning resources showed a subtle lag in inhibition and cognitive flexibility performance that persisted at kindergarten entry age, despite exhibiting gradual catch up to their more advantaged peers for the nonexecutive, baseline task condition. The study provides a unique characterization of the early developmental pathways for inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility and highlights the critical role of stimulating early educational resources for shaping the dynamic ontogeny of executive control.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it