The effect of expectation of external rewards on preschoolers’ flexibility.

This paper examines whether expectation of rewards influences cognitive flexibility of preschoolers. Four to five year olds (N = 47) were randomly assigned to either reward-informed or reward-uninformed. Children in the reward-informed condition were told they would receive a toy reward if they performed target task very well. Children in the reward-uninformed condition were told nothing about rewards. The target task was the Flexible Item Selection Test (FIST). To control individual differences, all participants underwent five cognitive tasks (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III, Appearance-Reality Task, Block Span Task, Bear-Tiger Task, and the Dimensional Change Card Sort). The results showed that the children in the reward-informed group performed significantly worse in the FIST though both conditions performed similarly in other cognitive tasks.Bachelor of Art