Assessing effects of social interaction on early development of executive function in infants

• Main Author: Tan, Xing Xi
• Other Authors: Victoria Leong
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166570
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis dissertation is made up of two sections: Section 1 - Interactive Executive Function Tasks for Parent-Infant Dyads and Section 2 - Comparing parent-infant and stranger-infant interaction effects on infant attentional set-shifting. Section 1 addresses the development of new methods for (1) early measurement of developing Executive Function (EF) skills during the infancy period and (2) concurrent, direct, objective assessment of effects of parent-child interaction quality on child Executive Function performance. Protocols for novel interactive EF tasks are outlined in this section, special emphasis will be given to the importance of the interactive role of a parent and its quality in these EF tasks. Section 2 demonstrates the utility of one of the interactive EF tasks mentioned in Section 1, the Sequential Touching Task (STT). The findings in this section will lend support to the evidence that the novel interactive EF tasks have the potential to be harnessed as successful measures of early EF development, and that parent-child interactions are important and crucial in early EF development, specifically in the domain of attention set-shifting abilities.