preparation
developingintelligence | June 13, 2008Children can be notoriously constrained to the present, but a fascinating article in JEP:HPP by Vallesi & Shallice shows exactly how strong that constraint can be: in a study with 4-11 year-olds, they show that only children older than about 5 years will take advantage of additional time provided for them to prepare for a simple task.
Among adults, this finding is part of the literature on "foreperiod phenomena." Classically, this refers to the finding that reaction times are disproportionately faster with longer intervals between a warning stimulus and an "imperative" stimulus (e.g…