Accomplishing inhibition tasks requires not only inhibitory skills but also goal maintenance. The present study aimed to disentangle goal maintenance from inhibition. Therefore, we experimentally manipulated goal-maintenance demands by means of feedback. Three-year-old (n = 84) and 4-year-old (n = 75) preschoolers were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions. Results revealed an age-dependent pattern: three-year-olds that were assigned to one of the conditions with feedback outperformed those assigned to the control condition without feedback. It seems that especially performance-related feedback reduced goal-maintenance demands in 3-year-olds, resulting in enhanced inhibitory performance. Four-year-olds, in contrast, showed high performance across all conditions. Age-differences between the 3- and 4-year-olds were only significant for the control condition. Thus, with feedback, performance of the 3-year-olds was similar to that of the 4-year-olds. The present results seem to indicate that in an inhibition task, 3-year-olds' struggle not only with inhibiting a prepotent response but also with adhering to the task goal.
Keywords: child development; executive function; feedback; goal maintenance; inhibition.