Tower of London: Planning development in children from 6 to 13 years of age

IRENE INJOQUE-RICLE; JUAN PABLO BARREYRO; ALEJANDRA CALERO; DEBORA INES BURIN

Spanish Journal of Psychology

Cambridge University Press

Lugar: Madrid; Año: 2014 vol. 17 p. 1 - 7

1138-7416

Executive Function is a multidimensional construct that includes a wide range of cognitive abilities that allow solving goal-directed behaviors efficiently. Its development begins in early childhood and continues through adolescence. A key aspect of Executive Function is planning, defined as the capacity to generate and organize the necessary step sequence to carry out a goal-directed behavior. The aim of this study was to assess the development of planning in children. The Tower of London task was used in 270 children aged 6, 8, 11, and 13 years. The results showed that the time required to generate and organize the plan to solve a goal-directed problem increases as the difficulty of the problem increases, and that older children need less time to solve problems with a certain level of difficulty than younger children. This demonstrates the development of planning through childhood and the first years of adolescence.Indexada en: PsychINFO, ERIC, Francis, IBECS, Index Medicus, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, ISOC, Latindex-Catálogo, Latindex-Directorio, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, Medline, Pascal, PSICODOC, Red ALyC, Scopus, Social Sciences Citation Index