Plasticity of task switching in childhood

In a rapidly changing world, it is often necessary to switch between different tasks in order to adapt behavior to changing circumstances and achieve long-term goals. As children grow up, they are confronted with more and more situations that require flexible switching between tasks, such as switching from one lesson to the next or finding alternative ways to solve a problem. However, switching to a different task comes at a cost: children are slower and make more errors than adults in conditions that require high task switching, presumably due to the lengthy development of cognitive control processes and their underlying neural circuits. In an ongoing study of 8- to 11-year-olds, we are investigating the mechanisms that allow children to improve their performance on task switching during practice and the causes of individual differences in these improvements.

This project is part of the priority program SPP 1772 "Mutitasking"  of the German Research Foundation.