THE DEVELOPMENT OF EXECUTIVE FUNCTION IN EARLY ...

REDESCRIPTION AND THE RELATION BETWEEN EXECUTIVE FUNCTION AND
CONCEPTUAL FLEXIBILITY
Perner, Stummer, Sprung, and Doherty (2002) recently developed a new account of the development of
executive function—one with precursors in work by Flavell (1988) and Inhelder and Piaget (1964), among
others. Although similar in many respects to Perner's earlier accounts (e.g., Perner et al., 1999), this new
account suggests that 3- to 4year-olds exhibit representational inflexibility because they lack a concept of
perspectives and, hence, cannot understand that a single stimulus can be redescribed in a different, incompatible
way from two different perspectives. This account can be applied to the DCCS in a straightforward fashion. For
example, in the preswitch phase of the DCCS, when sorting by color, children may describe a red rabbit as a red
one. Then, in the postswitch phase, they may need to describe that same stimulus as a rabbit. If 3- to 4-year-olds
fail to understand that it is possible to provide multiple descriptions of a single stimulus, then they will persist in
describing the test cards in terms of the preswitch dimension, as suggested by Zelazo and Frye (1997) and Frye
(1999). Another version of this account suggests that even 3-year-olds can, in principle, understand alternative
descriptions in the DCCS, but that they become much more likely to do so at around 4 years of age (Perner &
Lang, 2002). In either case, the changes occur at about 4 years of age because this is when children acquire the
concept of perspectives, which allows them readily to appreciate that a single stimulus can be described in two
different ways.
Perner's redescription account can be distinguished from another account emphasizing redescription.
According to Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) Representational Redescription model, knowledge is originally
represented in an implicit, procedural format (called "level I"). Knowledge in this format is modular and
inflexible: the procedures are data-driven and they must be "run off" in their entirety. With sufficient practice,
behavioral mastery of these procedures is achieved and the knowledge is automatically redescribed into a more
abstract, explicit format (called "E 1") that reveals the structure of the procedures. Although this newly
redescribed knowledge is explicit, it is not conscious. At this level of redescription, separate aspects (or
components) of the knowledge can interact with aspects of other explicitly represented knowledge, but they
cannot be consciously manipulated. Consciousness comes with yet additional levels of redescription or
"explicitation," that occur "spontaneously as part of an internal drive toward the creation of intra-domain and
inter-domain relationships" (1992, p. 18). Level E2 is conscious but cannot be verbalized, whereas Level E3 is
conscious and verbalizable. The Representational Redescription model would account for 3- to 4-year-olds'
inflexibility on the DCCS by proposing that their knowledge of the rules is less than fully explicit (due to lack
of experience, not age). For example, children's knowledge might be represented at Levels E 1 or E2 but not
E3.
REVIEW OF EXTANT RESEARCH ON THE DIMENSIONAL CHANGE CARD SORT
The four approaches just described complexity theories, memory accounts, accounts emphasizing inhibitory
control, and accounts emphasizing redescription—emphasize different aspects of the development of
executive function and postulate different underlying mechanisms. Although all of these approaches can be
applied in a straightforward fashion to the basic finding that 3- to 4-year-olds often perseverate on the DCCS,
they make different predictions about the effects of experimental manipulations of features of the DCCS. The
research reported in this Monograph will be discussed in terms of these accounts, but before describing this
research we will first review the existing literature, starting with some background information regarding the
rule-use paradigm.
The DCCS is an example of the rule-use paradigm, which was developed during the 1920s by Vygotsky,
Luria, and Leontiev in their work on the verbal regulation of behavior. Rules are statements (usually if-then
statements) that specify relations between antecedent conditions and actions to be executed or inferences to be
made. In any rule-use task, participants are presented explicitly with rules and required to use them to guide
their behavior. For example, in one series of studies (Luria, 1961), children were told to squeeze a bulb when a
red light flashed, but to refrain from squeezing when a green light flashed. To succeed on this task, it is
necessary to keep the rules in mind (i.e., in working memory) and to follow them. The instructions may be