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  • Unlike our study of adults Moser et al we did

    2018-11-13

    Unlike our study of adults (Moser et al., 2011), we did not find support for our Exendin-3 (9-39) amide that Pe would mediate the link between growth mindset and post-error accuracy in this sample of school-aged children. This discrepancy suggests the functional significance of the Pe (i.e., how it relates to behavior and mindset, Schroder and Moser, 2014) may differ across development. In adults, more attention allocation to errors (Pe) may be a necessary mechanism linking the growth mindset belief with the tendency to bounce back from mistakes. In contrast, attention allocation is not necessary for growth-minded children to bounce back (the Pe does not have the same mediational role). This suggests there are additional mechanisms among growth-minded children that promote post-error resilience. It is worth noting the correlation between mindset and Pe difference uncovered here was rather modest in size (r=0.20) and smaller than the correlation found in our adult study (r=0.52, Moser et al., 2011), meaning that although on average growth-minded children tended to have larger Pes, there were plenty of growth-minded children who had average or below-average Pes (see Fig. 1 scatterplot). The exploratory analyses revealed that growth mindset endorsement was most related to post-error accuracy among children with smaller Pe difference amplitudes. In contrast, growth mindset was unrelated to post-error accuracy among children with larger Pe difference amplitudes. This finding is interesting as it may suggest that growth mindset compensates for lower attentional allocation to errors in young children: despite attending less to their errors, children with growth mindset still performed well. This is reminiscent of the mindset literature in the academic achievement domain, which indicates the growth mindset is especially helpful for students with limited economic resources (Claro et al., 2016; Yeager et al., 2016). Similarly, our results suggest the growth mindset is most helpful for children who have limited attentional resources to allocate to errors. However, these conclusions should be considered speculative as they are derived from an exploratory analysis. Nonetheless, future research aimed at understanding this subset of children may shed light how the growth mindset preserves post-error resilience in the absence of attention. Our results may offer some practical implications for parents and educators as well. It is a seemingly natural reaction to comfort children when they make mistakes. However, subtle linguistic cues intended to comfort struggling students (e.g., “it’s OK, you’re still smart in other subjects”) can backfire in significant ways (Brummelman et al., 2014; Gunderson et al., 2013; Mueller and Dweck, 1998; Rattan et al., 2012). Past mindset work focused on motivational remedies such as attributing errors to a lack of effort rather than a lack of ability (e.g., Dweck, 1975). Our findings, as well as previous ERP findings in adults (Mangels et al., 2006; Moser et al., 2011) also highlight the importance of paying attention to mistakes as a crucial mechanism of recovery. It is possible that adults’ attempts to comfort children may hinder the learning process by influencing the extent to which children attend to and make sense of their mistakes. That is, adults may inadvertently distract children from learning from their errors. This is an exciting avenue for future research to explore. Future studies will also need to examine how experimentally induced mindsets impact error-related brain activity in young children. There may be important differences between “trait” mindsets and experimentally induced “state” mindsets in terms of attention allocation to the task and post-error performance. Only one study has examined this question and it was conducted in an adult sample. College students were led to believe that intelligence was either driven primarily by the environment (a growth mindset message) or by genetic factors (a fixed mindset message) before completing the flanker task (Schroder et al., 2014). Schroder et al. (2014) found that individuals exposed to the growth mindset actually had smaller Pe amplitudes to both error and correct responses, compared to those exposed to the fixed mindset message. However, the Pe amplitude was associated with less post-error slowing (indicative of more efficient post-error behavior) only among those exposed to the growth mindset. Understanding how similar interventions (e.g., Blackwell et al., 2007; Mueller and Dweck, 1998) impact error-processing ERPs among school-aged children would be especially important given the increasing usage of growth mindset messages in schools.