Revisiting the Inverted-U: Congruency Tasks Reveal Divergent Developmental Trajectories

The Simon, Stroop, and flanker tasks are commonly used to investigate cognitive control. However, it remains unclear whether these three tasks in fact measure the same cognitive abilities and in the same proportion. We take a developmental approach to this question: if the tasks all roughly measure the same capacity, they should show similar patterns of age-related change. We present data from two massive online studies: Study 1 included 9,642 participants 10 to 80 years of age who completed the Simon and Stroop tasks, and Study 2 included 13,448 participants 10 to 79 years of age who completed the flanker task. The results revealed markedly different developmental trajectories among the tasks, with only the flanker task following an inverted U-shaped trajectory. These findings caution against using standard congruency tasks to draw general conclusions about the development of cognitive control and underscore the importance of developing more psychometrically rigorous measures