Executive Function and the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task

Source: Laboratories of Nicholaus Noles and Judith Danovitch—University of Louisville

Infants are born with amazing cognitive resources at their disposal, but they don’t know how to use them effectively. In order to harness the power of their brains, humans must develop high-level cognitive processes that manage basic brain functions. These processes make up what psychologists refer to as executive function. Executive function is a key factor in many self-regulatory behaviors, including forming plans to solve problems, negotiating between desires and actions, and directing attention. For example, a child must use several executive processes to stop playing with toys and start cleaning their room. These processes include inhibition (to stop what they’re doing), planning (to determine what actions need to be performed to clean the room), and attentional control (to stay on task until the cleaning is done). A breakdown of executive function during any of these steps would lead to the room remaining dirty.

Developing executive function is one of the key challenges faced by children as they mature. Some elements of executive function can only be mastered with practice, and brain areas linked to executive function, specifically the prefrontal cortex, develop slowly throughout development, continuing to grow and organize until an individual reaches their twenties. Early demonstrations of executive function have been linked to self-control and behavioral outcomes in children, as well as successes later in life. Relatedly, executive function is impaired in children diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorders.

This experiment demonstrates how to assess executive function in children using the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task, developed by Dr. Philip Zelazo and colleagues.¹

Recruit children between the ages of 3 and 5 with no visual impairment, color blindness, or hearing impairment. For the purposes of this demonstration, only one child is tested. Larger sample sizes are recommended when conducting any experiments.

1. Data collection

Setup
1. Create a set of 16 cards, including 2 target cards and 14 test cards.
  1. Target cards depict a red boat and a blue rabbit on a white background.
  2. Test cards are split evenl

In the pre-switch phase of the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task, children are building up patterns of thinking and attention, and those mental activities guide their physical responses. They learn to pay special attention to color, to ignore shape, and to place cards into the relevant trays. The post-switch phase requires children to shift their attention to a new dimension, which they had to actively ignore in the prior task, and to overcome their tendency to perform certain physical actions (e.g., putting the

The Dimensional Change Card Sort Task is a tool designed to evaluate children’s executive function. The basic version described here can be used to effectively evaluate the executive function of 3- to 5-year-old children. However, there are permutations of this task that can be used to characterize executive function in children up to age 7. This task can also be used diagnostically to identify children with particularly poor executive function, which can be indicative of developmental delay, mental retardation, ce