Research Objective
The aim of this study is to combine expertise from economics, psychology and neuroscience to collaboratively examine the impact of socioeconomic conditions in early childhood on cognitive development, focusing on executive functioning, a dimension of cognitive development which has been found to be crucial to success in later life. Dr. Sheridan developed a series of 5 executive function tasks and in collaboration with the Young Lives study, researchers collected data on ~4,000 participants. The tasks are unique in that they do not contain a language component, so they can be collected regardless of language and literacy ability.