| Popis: |
Executive function (EF) refers to the ability to control thoughts and emotions. This ability develops throughout childhood, and the development of EF is underpinned by the development of prefrontal function. There are several theories to characterize children's EF, such as subcomponent models (e.g., cognitive shifting, inhibition, updating) and a cool/hot model. However, the relationship between EF development and the prefrontal cortex is poorly understood. Here, we examine the relationship from the perspective of mathematical category theory. Mathematical category theory describes similarities and relationships in mathematical structures and is increasingly applied to the structure of computation in computer science and consciousness research. In developmental science, analyses using category theory are applied to analyze an EF task, dimensional change card sorting (DCCS), and researchers argue that the difficulty of the DCCS task is related to mathematical product, which is a notion of integration (Phillips et al., 2009). Specifically, younger children can easily perform the DCCS task without product, but only older children can perform the DCCS task with product. We hypothesized that the processing of the mathematical product requires activations in prefrontal regions and tested this hypothesis in young children. |
