Children coordinate two tasks simultaneously at several occasions
throughout the day; however, this dual-task ability and its development across childhood are poorly understood. Therefore, the
current study investigated age-related changes in children’s dualtask ability using a large cross-sectional sample of 8- to 13-yearold children (N = 135). In our dual-task methodology, children
were asked to walk across an electronic pathway while performing
three concurrent cognitive tasks. These tasks targeted at children’s
executive function components: inhibition, switching, and updating skills. Our findings indicate associations between age and children’s stride time variability but not with normalized velocity.
Younger children showed higher stride time variability in the
dual-task situation as compared with older children after accounting for their single-task performance, intelligence, anthropometric
variables, and sex, indicating a more regular gait pattern in older
children. Furthermore, age was differently related to children’s
accuracy in solving the concurrent cognitive tasks. Whereas age
was associated with children’s performance in the updating and
switching task, there was no relation between age and children’s
inhibitory skills. In addition, our data imply that children’s dualtask ability was associated with a number of individual variables.
In particular, children with higher intelligence scores showed
fewer errors and girls showed lower stride time variability in the
dual tasks. Our results suggest a considerable developmental progression in children’s ability to coordinate two simultaneous
tasks across middle childhood. Furthermore, our study qualifies
previous dual-task research and implies that heterogeneous findings may be related to a differential involvement of executive function components in the dual task