What would Goofy do? Revising the Batman Effect: Self-Distancing and Executive Function in Preschoolers.

Our ability to exercise self-control underlies many important life skills such as goal-oriented behaviour, decision-making, and social skills (Duckworth & Kern, 2011). Early control skills are associated with later life outcomes, including school readiness (Fitzpatrick & Pagani, 2012) and academic achievement (Spiegel et al., 2021). Preschoolers often perform poorly on complex tasks that assess self-control skills, also known as executive function(EF). EF can be understood as the higher-order, neurocognitive processes that constitute a range of abilities, including working memory, response inhibition, and flexibility, that are necessary for controlling thought and action in problem-solving, adaptive function, and self-regulation (Garon et al., 2008; Zelazo, 2015). EF skills develop rapidly in the preschool years (Zelazo & Carlson, 2012), alongside dynamicchanges in the structure of the brain (Brown & Jernigan, 2012), making early interventions especially promising. The question then stands: What can we do to help preschoolers develop their control skills? One problem children may face while performing control tasks is that they are too narrowly focused on the task at hand and are unable to view it comprehensively. Various interventions to facilitate control skills have been explored, but a recent development has been the use of distancing(White & Carlson, 2015), which may allow children to comprehend the “bigger picture” of a task. Self-distancing is the process of creating cognitive separation between oneself and the situation by adopting a non-egocentric perspective(White & Carlson, 2015). White and Carlson (2015) found that for preschoolers, increasing distance from the self was associated with improvements in executive function, with 5 year olds driving the effect. Graded distance from the self was achieved by having children refer to themselves either in the first person (self-immersed), the third person or as a character (i.e. Batman), with the adoption of a character role being considered the most distant from the self. However, other research(Veraksa et al., 2019), on 5 to 6 year olds, suggests that it is not self-distancing per se that improves performance, but that it is the valence (benevolent vs. malevolent) of the character role that affects the performance on EF tasks. To replicate and expand upon these findings in preschoolers, the present study employs a betweensubjects design to evaluate whether character competence affects EF through self-distancing. Data collection is ongoing, with a projected sample size of 76 preschoolers, aged 3-5 years old. White and Carlson (2015) proposed that developed ToM could account for greater efficacy of self-distancing, since they only observed the self-distancing effect in 5 year olds. Therefore, we record participants’ composite ToM score (False Belief, Appearance Reality, Smarties, and the Unexpected Contents tasks). While previous studies assigned exemplar character roles, we provide more specificity by systematically manipulating character competence while verifying children’s perceptions of character traits. Baseline EF(Foward Word Span task), ToM(battery of ToM tasks), and post-manipulation EF performance (Shape School, Dimensional Change Card Sort and Grass/Snow tasks) were measured. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Board of the University of Victoria. Data collection commenced in December 2025 and will be completed by June 2026. We hypothesize that 1.) EF scores will improve with further distance from the self (i.e. control