Executive Functions and Their Differential Contribution to Sustained Attention in 5- to 8-Year-Old Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Everyday routine in general and school settings in particular make high demands on children’s abilities to sustaintheir focus of attention over longer time periods. School tasks thus require the child to accomplish the task on anappropriate level of performance while maintaining the focus of attention even under repetitious or distractingconditions. However, sustained attention (SA) may be a more heterogeneous construct than commonly assumedas it requires the individual not only to sustain attentional capacities but also to store and maintain the task rule(working memory), to inhibit inappropriate responses (inhibition), and to switch according to requirements(switching). It might thus involve processes counted among executive functions (EF). In the present study,performance in EF tasks (covering the core components inhibition, switching, and working memory) and in a SAtask was assessed in 118 children, aged between 5;0 and 8;11 years. Similar age-dependent performancetrajectories were found in EF components and SA, indicating ongoing performance improvements between 5until at least 8 years of age in SA and in EF. Interrelations between single EF components and SA showed to besmall to moderate. Finally, different patterns of SA performance predictions were found in age-homogeneoussubgroups with inhibition being crucial for SA performance in the youngest and switching in the oldest agegroup. Taken as a whole, even though similarities in assumed developmental trajectories and substantialinterrelations point to common underlying processes in EF and SA, age-dependent patterns of explained varianceindicate clear discriminability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".