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COMMENTARY ON THE CHANGING NATURE OF EXECUTIVE CONTROL IN PRESCHOOL.

Michael T Willoughby
Published in: Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (2019)
In this commentary, I provide a critical evaluation of Espy and colleagues' proposal to use a bifactor modeling approach to characterize children's performance on executive control tasks. I draw attention to an old idea regarding treating items as causal or effect indicators of their latent constructs. I remind readers that factor analytic approaches, including the bifactor model that is proposed here, assume that executive control tasks are effect indicators of the latent construct of executive control. I suggest that executive control tasks may be better conceptualized as causal indicators. I further suggest that these different modeling approaches will result in markedly different conclusions about the nature of executive control-including predictors and outcomes of executive control that were the focus of this monograph.
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