What Is Cognitive Control?

Imagine yourself at age 3 years—let us say, 3 and a half. It is Saturday morning in late autumn, and instead of being at home in your pajamas watching Scooby-Doo , you fi nd yourself in a university laboratory sitting across from a grown-up, a graduate student named Kay, who would also perhaps prefer to be somewhere else. You think of the Happy Meal you were promised if you got in the car in the fi rst place. Kay places a cookie in front of you, and tells you that if you wait a few minutes, and do not eat the cookie, you will get two more cookies. Then she leaves the room. What do you do? Do you wait? For how long? As it happens, your decision to wait, and especially how long you wait, will likely predict important developmental outcomes later in life. Pioneering work by Mischel and colleagues has revealed that children ’s behavior in this experimental situation, the delay of gratifi cation task, predicts future academic ability, including higher SAT scores, better social, cognitive, and emotional coping in adolescence, and better performance on measures of cognitive control in adulthood (e.g., Casey et al., 2011; Eigsti et al., 2006; Mischel, Shoda, & Peake, 1988; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989; Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990). Other researchers (e.g., Moffi tt et al., 2011) have provided corroborating evidence that higher cognitive