Professor Sandra Wiebe and Mr Shuai Shao present at SoLEC Seminar Series

On 18 September 2025, the Science of Learning in Education Centre (SoLEC) hosted 2 SoLE Seminars. The seminar delivered by Professor Sandra Wiebe from the University of Alberta, provided deep insights into the development and measurement of executive function (EF) across the early years, highlighting both methodological challenges and theoretical advances. She emphasised the "task impurity problem," underscoring how executive and content demands are intertwined in commonly used tasks, complicating the assessment of EF. Through evidence from adult and child studies, Professor Wiebe explained how EF can be modeled into components such as shifting, updating, and inhibition, and how these structures may differ across developmental stages. Importantly, she discussed the trajectory of EF growth in early childhood, with working memory and inhibition emerging as critical capacities, and noted distinctions between “hot” and “cool” EF depending on emotional and reward contexts. Drawing on large-scale cohort studies such as the Midwest Infant Development Study, she further demonstrated how contextual factors like socio-economic status and early life experiences shape EF development. Overall, her presentation stressed the importance of rigorous measurement, nuanced theoretical modeling, and recognition of environmental influences in understanding how EF supports children’s ability to regulate thoughts, actions, and emotions during formative years.

Mr Shuai Shao from the University of California, San Diego presentation focused on how children and adults’ reason about economic distribution systems, specifically the contrast between egalitarian and merit-based approaches. Using engaging scenarios such as “Same Pay for All” versus “More Pay for More Sales” clubs, he illustrated how individuals make systematic social inferences about fairness, effort, and compensation from an early age. His findings highlighted that while merit-based systems can motivate greater effort, they may also trigger interpersonal conflict, whereas egalitarian systems encourage perceptions of cooperation. He also examined how gender perceptions shape expectations of who might prefer merit-based systems, and how these views evolve across children, adolescents, and adults. Importantly, his research pointed out the broader implications of reward systems—showing why they sometimes motivate but can also backfire when hardworking individuals feel their contributions are ignored. By linking concepts of personal effort, interpersonal relationships, morality, and risk-taking, Shuai Shao provided new insights into the developmental and social underpinnings of how fairness and equity are understood across the lifespan.