If we asked the general public about what makes the “best” type of learner, most people would describe a child who is attentive and able to concentrate for a long period of time. They may also describe children whois able to hold a lot of information in their mind and manipulate that information to critically think about and solve diverse sets of problems. These skills are typically referred to as executive functions and represents a person’s ability to exert control over their attention, behaviors, and thoughts. Much research suggests that these abilities do in fact promote children’s academic and social success, specifically in formal school settings. Developing executive functioning skills may be great for building upon what we already know, but come at the cost. Executive functioning skills may also bias children to think less creatively and not come up with a rich set of alternatives to novel problems and situations. More flexible modes of thinking may promote creativity, implicit learning (e.g. learning complex information without awareness that information has been learned), and inductive reasoning.There is some evidence that suggests that experiences of stress may reduce children’s abilities to use executive functioning skills, but increase the likelihood of using more flexible patterns of thinking.
The MoCA study that you and your children participated in aimed to test these theories by seeing if acute experimental stress (e.g. doing badly on a set of tasks), would decrease executive functioning skills and support more flexible ways of thinking and using new information. By collecting saliva, we were able to test if children were actually exhibiting a stressful response to the experiment. Those who experienced stressed showed worse performances on tests of EF and notably, those same children showed better inductive reasoning and more flexibility, compared to a control group.