I’m grateful for the support I’ve received over the course of my career—support from my parents, from valued mentors and colleagues, and from outstanding students—and it’s on their behalf that I am honored to receive the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Psychology. The list of past recipients includes many of my intellectual heroes, and it’s humbling to see my name among them.
Growing up I was given rare opportunities to experience the field firsthand. For my senior project in high school, for example, I had the opportunity to work in Jerry Kagan’s lab at Harvard, and it was there that I got to know Steve Reznick, who would later become my PhD advisor at Yale. At the time, however, I was reluctant to go into what I thought of as the family business, and when I started as an undergraduate at McGill, it was as an English major who wanted to explore the development of consciousness as a novelist. But I really enjoyed Intro to Psychology, and the subject matter came easily to me. What must have been some inherent momentum grew as I learned about the functions of prefrontal cortex in a course taught by Michael Petrides (with a guest lecture by Brenda Milner). In my 3rd year, I changed my major to Psychology and worked with Tom Shultz, who introduced me to formal modeling and oversaw my first foray into the topic of rule use in childhood (Zelazo & Shultz, 1989).
At Yale, Steve was an autonomy supportive mentor who allowed me to pursue my interest in the development of consciousness by examining its behavioral manifestations—studied under the rubric of executive function (EF). In an initial series of studies (e.g., Zelazo & Reznick, 1991), 2.5- and 3-year-old children were asked to sort pictures by a relatively arbitrary pair of rules (e.g., “things that go inside vs. outside the house.”). Despite answering correctly when asked whether each item belonged inside or outside, most 2.5-year-olds perseverated on the initial rule. In contrast, most 3-year-olds sorted correctly. The deliberate use of two explicit rules is a clear example of the conscious control of attention and behavior, and its emergence around 3 years of age heralds an important change in children’s EF skills and underlying changes in conscious reflection. Subsequent improvements in EF were revealed in my dissertation, which introduced the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) and found that although most 3-year-olds can use a pair of rules, they have difficulty formulating and using a higher-order rule for switching between incompatible pairs of rules. The DCCS proved valuable for exploring the nature of EF, the mechanisms underlying its development, and the relations between EF and other developing skills (e.g., theory of mind; Frye et al., 1995), and it helped reveal EF to be one of the major dimensions along which neurocognitive development typically unfolds.
Over the course of my career, first at Toronto and now at Minnesota, I worked collaboratively with cherished colleagues and students to conduct research that established the importance to EF skills of metacognitive reflection, hierarchical complexity, mindfulness, circadian rhythms, and emotion (hot vs. cool EF), among other things (e.g., Zelazo et al. 2003). This work led to the formulation of influential theories of EF and its development (e.g., the Cognitive Complexity and Control theory – revised, the Hierarchical Competing Systems Model; the Iterative Reprocessing model; e.g., Zelazo, 2015), the creation of interventions for promoting the healthy development of EF (e.g., Espinet et al., 2013), and insights into developmental psychopathology (e.g., Zelazo, 2020). More recently, and looking forward, I’ve been working with Ellen Galinsky to establish at Minnesota a new civic science center for supporting mental health and learning in children and youth. Civic science is an approach in which scientists recognize their role as citizens and work together with communities to support their needs (Zelazo et al., 2024). The center will serve as intellectual hub of innovation that coordinates research, policy, and practices to design, develop, and disseminate evidence-based transformative tools that are sustainable and scalable, and we hope it will foster the next generation of civic scientists who are committed to making a meaningful difference in the lives of children and youth.
References
Espinet, S. D., Anderson, J. E., & Zelazo, P. D. (2013). Reflection training improves executive function in preschool-age children: Behavioral and neural effects. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 4, 3-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2012.11.009opens in new window
Frye, D., Zelazo, P. D. & Palfai, T. (1995). Theory of mind and rule-based reasoning. Cognitive Development, 10, 483-527. https://doi.org/10.1016/0885-2014(95)90024-1opens in new window
Zelazo, P. D. (2015). Executive function: Reflection, iterative reprocessing, complexity, and the developing brain. Developmental Review, 38, 55-68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2015.07.001opens in new window
Zelazo, P. D. (2020). Executive function and psychopathology: A neurodevelopmental perspective. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 16. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-072319-024242opens in new window
Zelazo, P. D., Calma-Birling, D., & Galinsky, E. (2024). Fostering executive function skills and promoting far transfer to real-world outcomes: The importance of life skills and civic science. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 33, 121-127. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241229664opens in new window
Zelazo, P. D., Muller, U., Frye, D., & Marcovitch, S. (2003). The development of executive function in early childhood. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 68(3), Serial No. 274.
Zelazo, P. D. & Reznick, J. S. (1991). Age related asynchrony of knowledge and action. Child Development, 62, 719 735. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131173opens in new window
Zelazo, P. D. & Shultz, T. R. (1989). Concepts of potency and resistance in causal prediction. Child Development, 60, 1307 1315. https://doi.org/10.2307/1130922opens in new window