| dc.description.abstract | In this study, children among the ages of four to six years were called preschool stage. At preschool stage, children usually went to kindergarten and began to learn lots of knowledge. Past studies have indicated that executive function has a significant improvement in preschool period. Oculomotor inhibition is one of the crucial abilities of executive function, but few studies have investigated the development and the characteristics of oculomotor inhibition in preschool children. A vast amount of information is received through visual pathways every day. Oculomotor inhibition plays an important role in suppressing an unnecessary eye-movement, and concentrating on learning. Many developmental studies have indicated that oculomotor inhibition will improve with age until the prefrontal lobe function becomes mature in adolescence. Moreover, this ability may be modulated by several factors, such as trial type probability and visual landmark etc. Oculomotor inhibition also has reported to have a significant correlation with intelligence or other executive functions, including impulsive control and conflict resolution. However, how these factors influencing oculomotor inhibition in preschool children are still unclear.
In this study, a version of children pro-/anti-saccade task was conducted to gauge the development of oculomotor inhibition, and several factors were manipulated to investigate the characteristics of oculomotor inhibition in preschool children. There were four experiments: (1) Three trial type probabilities were manipulated to investigate how this factor modulating inhibitory control. (2) A visual landmark was added to examine how this factor benefits the inhibitory control. Furthermore, four age groups, including 4y, 5y, 6y and young adults, were recruited to understand the developmental changes of oculomotor inhibition and to compare the inhibitory differences between preschool children and adults. (3) Two hypotheses of competition model and attentional re-allocation were testified to investigate which one can explain the inhibitory mechanism when adding a visual landmark. (4) Two correlational analyses were conducted to understand the relationships between oculomotor inhibition, impulsive control (measured by stop-signal task) and conflict resolution (measured by attentional network task), and to investigate the associations between oculomotor inhibition and intelligence (measured by WPPSI-R and Ravens).
We found that oculomotor inhibition has a gradual but significant development in preschool period. This ability may be improved when there are higher probability of anti-saccade trials or when adding a visual landmark in the opposite direction of the target. Moreover, oculomotor inhibition has significant correlations with intelligence, especially with fluid intelligence, and with impulsive control. Children with higher intelligence quotient scores or with better impulsive control may have better oculomotor inhibition in preschool period.
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