While working, you may need to prevent mind wandering and ignore the temptation to check your emails and Facebook page. Efficient control over your own thoughts, actions and emotions will help you stay on task and get it done. I am interested in how children develop efficient cognitive control, which is one of the best predictors of critical life outcomes such as health, academic achievement, income, and criminality.
Biography
Wee Nicolas!
I’m currently a Lecturer in Developmental Psychology. Before coming to Edinburgh, I received my PhD in Psychology at the University of Provence in France (my home country) and completed post-doctoral training at the University of Nebraska and the University of Colorado in the United States.
Likes: chocolate, movies, skiing
Dislikes: salmon, spiders, rain
Research
My work uses behavioural, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological (ERPs) measures to address how preschoolers and school-age children develop increasingly efficient cognitive control over their thoughts, actions and emotions. I am especially interested in how children decide what they need to do and how to best implement control based on environmental information, available cognitive means and previous experience.
Publications
- Chevalier, N., James, T. D., Wiebe, S. A., Nelson, J. M., & Espy, K. A. (in press). Contribution of reactive and proactive control to children’s working memory performance: Insight from item recall durations in response sequence planning. Developmental Psychology.
- Chevalier, N., Chatham, C. H., & Munakata, Y. (in press). The practice of going helps children to stop: The importance of context monitoring in inhibitory control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
- Chevalier, N., Huber, K. L., Wiebe, S. A., & Espy, K. A. (2013). Qualitative change in executive control during childhood and adulthood. Cognition, 128, 1-12.
- Clark, C. A. C., Sheffield, T. D., Chevalier, N., Nelson, J. M., Wiebe, S. A., & Espy, K. A. (2013). Charting emergent trajectories of executive control with the Shape School. Developmental Psychology, 49(8), 1481-1493.
- Chevalier, N., Sheffield, T. D., Nelson, J. M., Clark, C. A. C., Wiebe, S. A., & Espy, K. A. (2012). Underpinnings of the costs of flexibility in preschool children: The roles of inhibition and working memory. Developmental Neuropsychology, 37(2), 99-118.
- More publications