Effortful control
= Effortful control
<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.<Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten by Clancy Blair and Rachel Peters Razza>[2007, abstract; measures and academic-outcome analyses]{ref}