Training impulsive children to talk to themselves: A means of developing self-control.

TLDR

The study situates self‑instruction training within a continuum from simple sensorimotor tasks to complex problem solving, likening it to the mental checklists used by drivers learning a new motor skill such as driving a stick‑shift car. The intervention used progressively challenging tasks over four sessions to teach the child to use self‑instructions for nonverbal control, with a model demonstration of a search‑and‑eliminate strategy, and assessed impulsivity changes with three psychometric tests before, after, and at follow‑up.

Abstract

A variety of tasks was employed to train the child to use self-instructions to control his nonverbal behavior. The tasks varied along a dimension from simple sensorimotor abilities to more complex problem-solving abilities. The difficulty level of the training tasks was increased over the four training sessions requiring more cognitively demanding activities. One can imagine a similar training sequence in the learning of a new motor skill such as driving a car. Initially the driver actively goes through a mental checklist, sometimes aloud, which includes verbal rehearsal, self-guidance, and sometimes appropriate self-reinforcement, especially when driving a stick-shift car. Three different psychometric tests were used to assess changes in behavioral and cognitive impulsivity during the pretreatment, posttreatment, and follow-up periods. The impulsive child was exposed to a model which demonstrated the strategy to search for differences that would allow him successively to eliminate as incorrect all variants but one.