PAPER Social factors in the development of early executive functioning: a closer look at the caregiving environment Annie Bernier, 1 Stephanie M. Carlson, 2 Marie Desche ˆnes 1 and Ce ´lia Matte-Gagne ´ 1 1. Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Canada 2. Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, USA Abstract This study investigated prospective links between quality of the early caregiving environment and children’s subsequent executive functioning (EF). Sixty-two families were met on five occasions, allowing for assessment of maternal interactive behavior, paternal interactive behavior, and child attachment security between 1 and 2 years of age, and child EF at 2 and 3 years. The results suggested that composite scores of parental behaviorand child attachment were related to child performance on EF tasks entailing strong working memory and cognitive flexibility components (conflict-EF). In particular, child attachment security was related to conflict-EF performance at 3 years above and beyond what was explained by a combination of all other social antecedents of child EF identified thus far: child verbal ability and prior EF, family SES, and parenting behavior. Attachment security may thus play a meaningful role in young children’s development of executive control. Introduction One of the most exciting advances in developmental science is the increasing integration of formerly inde- pendent lines of research, notably neuroscience and social development research (see e.g. Stiles, 2009; Zelazo, Chandler & Crone, 2010). This integration was spawned in part by suggestions that early relational experiences should have a substantial impact on brain development (e.g. Nelson & Bloom, 1997). Indeed, the first few years of life constitute a time of remarkable brain plasticity (Huttenlocher & Dabholkar, 1997), during which expe- rience largely determines which synaptic connections persist and which are pruned due to lack of use (see Greenough & Black, 1992). In this context, one aspect of child functioning that appears susceptible to strong caregiving influences is child executive functioning (EF), a set of higher-order cognitive processes such as impulse control, set-shifting, planning and working memory, that take a managerial role in the monitoring of goal-directed action and self-regulated responses to novel or ambigu- ous situations (Garon, Bryson & Smith, 2008; Hughes, Graham & Grayson, 2004). EF is inextricably linked to the prefrontal cortex, which shows protracted post-natal development (e.g. Giedd, Blumenthal, Jeffries, Castell- anos, Liu, Zijdenbos, Paus, Evans & Rapoport, 1999; Sowell, Trauner, Gamst & Jernigan, 2002). Many have argued that this largely post-natal development leaves a substantial window of opportunity for environmental input to impact the development of frontal brain systems (Kolb, Forgie, Gibb, Gorny & Rowntree, 1998) and related executive functions (Noble, Norman & Farah, 2005). In contrast to these strong theoreticał claims, empirical research demonstrating the role of social factors in the development of child EF is still scarce, and a good deal of it has used distal proxies such as family socioeconomic status. At a much more proximal level, parent–child relations arguably constitute the most intense and enduring relationships of early childhood, thereby rep- resenting the very core of the young child’s environment, especially in the first few years of life. Indirect support for their putative role in EF development stems from studies that have found parenting to relate to constructs bearing many similarities to some components of EF, labeled for instance as self-regulation (Jennings, Sand- berg, Kelley, Valdes, Yaggi, Abrew & Macey-Kalcevic, 2008; LeCuyer & Houck, 2006) or effortful control (Kochanska, Murray & Harlan, 2000; Poehlmann, Schwichtenberg, Shah, Shlafer, Hahn & Maleck, 2010). Parent–child relations are thus prime candidates to account for environmentally driven individual differences in young children’s frontal ⁄ executive development, but have received little empirical attention in EF research thus far. Addressing this gap, the current study examines the prospective links between the early caregiving Address for correspondence: Annie Bernier, Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, P.O. Box 6128 Downtown Station, Montreal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada; e-mail: annie.bernier@umontreal.ca Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Developmental Science 15:1 (2012), pp 12–24 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01093.x