Child’s Ability To Control His Behaviour

Nikki Attkisson | Last Updated : April 26, 2021

Executive feature, which is the power to regulate your own actions, may not be entirely in your brain. 

According to a modern hypothesis, it evolves with many forces from beyond the mind. It is based on dynamic systems theory. This theory has previously been used to explain the foundation behind complex processes such as cloud formation, which require a certain form of organization. Now, further studies are using it to understand executive control, which has an effect on a wide variety of actions. It includes everything from a child’s readiness to school, social interactions, as well as long-term adult outcomes.

Child’s Ability To Control His Behaviour

According to Perone, the executive function is just about guiding the actions using signals from the environment. There is a practice of using our experience and standards to determine what is the right course to follow as people, so we want to help children create certain associations between stimuli and appropriate behaviors to promote executive function growth. This is due to executive function.

Child's Ability To Control His Behaviour

Sammy Perone led this study and is the Assistant professor, Human Development, Washington State University.

This theory, which itself is detailed in Perspectives on Psychological Science, is based on dynamic systems theory. It has been further used to explain complicated organizing processes such as bird flight patterns and cloud formation. This study team headed by Washington State University assistant professor of human development Sammy Perone is extending it to executive function. This executive function has been previously linked to everything from school readiness to social interactions in children. Its presence has also been linked with long-term adult outcomes.

How we can further use it to our advantage is something of profound value. To develop a proper understanding, one should use signals in a classroom that could involve items like wall decorations, visual orders, or the pattern in which the tables are set up. Moreover, eliminating external disturbances, such as getting sharpened pencils on hand or resolving a tottering desk chair, can also help children regulate their behavior.

Perone added physical factors to be often overlooked. As a result, it tends to affect the child’s executive performance. Other factors that are strong attributes to executive performance are whether a child sleeps well or eats enough.

Working memory, inhibitory regulation, or the capacity to interrupt yourself from doing something, and cognitive resilience, or the ability to move from one task to the next, were formerly thought to be three separate neurocognitive mechanisms. This viewpoint has been questioned, according to Perone. “One would assume that if these particular thought mechanisms are what makes up executive performance, one should consciously practice those processes only and use them everywhere,” he said.

That, as it turns out, does not exist, as has now been studied many times. Since people think and respond in a context, we can’t just teach executive control by performing machine simulations on working memory.

The latest theory is now based on the work of cognitive scientist Sabine Doebel, who in 2020 proposed redefining executive function as “growth of skills in using power in the service of actions.”

Perone and his co-authors from the University of Kansas and the University of Tennessee have now added this new concept and are further using dynamics systems theory to describe how humans coordinate their actions using a number of external variables.

We need to learn even more about executive function. It works in the real world as goal-directed action. According to Perone, research needs to shed some light on this as, “When you look at it from the perspective provided in this study, it becomes a lot more realistic for childcare providers and parents, because it’s where kids are thought, acting, and creating.”


Nikki Attkisson

With over 15 years as a practicing journalist, Nikki Attkisson found herself at Powdersville Post now after working at several other publications. She is an award-winning journalist with an entrepreneurial spirit and worked as a journalist covering technology, innovation, environmental issues, politics, health etc. Nikki Attkisson has also worked on product development, content strategy, and editorial management for numerous media companies. She began her career at local news stations and worked as a reporter in national newspapers.

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