The value of proactive goal setting and choice in 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds' use of working memory gating strategies in a naturalistic task

Rule‐guided behavior depends on the ability to strategically update and act on content held in working memory. Proactive and reactive control strategies were contrasted across two experiments using an adapted input/output gating paradigm (Neuron, 81, 2014 and 930). Behavioral accuracies of 3‐, 5‐, and 7‐year‐olds were higher when a contextual cue appeared at the beginning of the task (input gating) rather than at the end (output gating). This finding supports prior work in older children, suggesting that children are better when input gating but rely on the more effortful output gating strategy for goal‐oriented action selection (Cognition, 155, 2016 and 8). A manipulation was added to investigate whether children's use of working memory strategies becomes more flexible when task goals are specified internally rather than externally provided by the experimenter. A shift toward more proactive control was observed when children chose the task goal among two alternatives. Scan path analyses of saccadic eye movement indicated that giving children agency and choice over the task goal resulted in less use of a reactive strategy than when the goal was determined by the experimenter. Choice over a task goal allowed 3 – 7‐year‐old children to shift towards more proactive control. Scan path analyses of saccadic eye movement indicated that giving children agency and choice resulted in less use of a reactive strategy than when the goal was determined by the experimenter. .