COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY AND INHIBITION AS PREDICTORS OF EARLY MATHEMATICAL COMPETENCIES IN PRESCHOOLERS

Mathematical performance is a basic instrumental competence for any educational system. Therefore, order to learn this discipline, several authors have highlighted the importance of the adequate development of early mathematical skills, due to their undeniable contribution to this objective. However, as these skills vary in complexity, their development probably places different demands on higher cognitive mechanisms and processes. Hence, the importance of knowing and assessing the executive functions that underlie these skills and that at an early age can predict or explain the differentiated performance in this area. Given this background, several studies have investigated the relationship between executive functions and mathematical skills; however, despite the abundant evidence, there is no consensus on the specific contribution of cognitive flexibility and inhibition in the development of early mathematical skills in preschool children. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the predictive capacity of cognitive flexibility and behavioral and cognitive inhibition in preschool children's early mathematical competencies of relational logic and numerical type. To meet this objective, a non-experimental ex post facto design was implemented with a sample of 104 preschool children, 50 prekindergarten students (48,1%; mean age = 4,97) and 54 kindergarten students (51,9%; mean age = 6,07), belonging to public schools (N = 32; 30,8%) and subsidized schools (N = 72; 69,2%) in the region of Valparaiso, Chile. For the evaluation of executive functions, a battery of three cognitive tests was applied: the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) to assess cognitive flexibility, the "Bzz! -Inhibition" subtest of the TENI Child Neuropsychology Evaluation Test to assess behavioral inhibition, and the Stroop task "Sun -Moon" to assess cognitive inhibition. The Chilean version of the Utrecht Early Numeracy Test (TEMT-U) was used to assess early mathematical skills, which evaluates mathematical skills divided into two groups: logical-relational skills that include comparison, classification, correspondence, and seriation, and numerical skills that integrate counting skills (verbal, structured and resultant) and general knowledge of numbers. For data analysis, descriptive analyses were performed to summarize the children's demographic information in the sample, correlation analysis to determine the association between the study variables, and hierarchical multiple linear regression models to evaluate the predictive capacity of the executive functions evaluated on the children's mathematical skills. The results showed that only cognitive flexibility was a significant predictor of the mathematical skills, both logical-relational and numerical, of the children in the sample, while neither behavioral inhibition nor cognitive inhibition explained the differentiated performance of the children in the mathematics test. These results allow us to know the cognitive mechanisms underlying the learning of the different components of mathematics in the preschool stage and thus provide specific information to educators so that they can plan their teaching strategies according to the cognitive demands required by each of them. This , may be a potential way to improve the effectiveness of teaching and favor the integration of strategies to stimulate cognitive flexibility in classroom work, thus promoting better learning achievements in this important disciplinary area both in the preschool and school stages.