Effortful control concerns deliberate regulation of attention and action, including inhibiting a dominant response and sustaining a less automatic one. It is an aspect of self-regulation, studied through both everyday ratings and performance tasks. These methods sample different settings and demands, so their scores need not be interchangeable.
An original task example gives a child a simple response rule, then asks for a different response when a familiar cue appears. Accuracy can depend on response inhibition, but also on understanding and remembering the rule. A low score therefore does not isolate inhibition without further comparisons. A rating of everyday effortful control instead summarizes behavior across observations and informants.
Clancy Blair and Rachel Peters Razza examined effortful control, executive function and false-belief understanding together in relation to emerging mathematics and literacy performance. Comparing these predictors helps distinguish overlapping constructs; a predictive association alone does not show that training one measured component causes an academic improvement.[ref]
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