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 (Chatham et al., 2014). 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 (Unger et al., 2016). A manipulation was added to investigate whether children's use of WM 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 amongst 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.