No Touch Pig!: Investigating Child-Parent Use of a System for Training Executive Function

Strengthening early executive function (EF) skills has the potential to improve an individual's quality of life throughout their lifetime, a fact that has led to many EF-training suites. In this work, we empirically investigate how children and parents engaged with Cookie Monster's Challenge (CMC), a tablet game designed to train EF in preschoolers. Through analysis of child-parent co-play with CMC, we describe children's and parents' thematic behaviors, documenting their effective and ineffective strategies for engaging with the game, particularly when it challenged children's EF skills. We further show that these behaviors led to a small but significant short-term increase in an unrelated EF task. Drawing on these patterns of interaction, we propose design directions for EF training interfaces, such as increasing contextual relevance and specific forms of scaffolding. Our work is the first illustration of how preschoolers exercise their EF and inhibitory control by collaboratively using a commercial tablet app together with a parent.