Electrocortical and behavioral measures of response monitoring in young children during a Go/No‐Go task

Abstract

The current study examined behavioral measures and response-locked event-related brain potentials (ERPs) derived from a Go/No-Go task in a large (N = 328) sample of 5- to 7-year-olds in order to better understand the early development of response monitoring and the impact of child age and sex. In particular, the error-related negativity (ERN, defined on both error trials alone and the difference between error and correct trials, or ΔERN), correct response negativity (CRN), and error positivity (Pe) were examined. Overall, the ERN, CRN, and the Pe were spatially and temporally similar to those measured in adults and older children. Even within our narrow age range, older children were faster and more accurate; a more negative ΔERN and a more positive Pe were associated with: increasing age, increased accuracy, and faster reaction times on errors, suggesting these enhanced components reflected more efficient response monitoring of errors over development. Girls were slower and more accurate than boys, although both genders exhibited comparable ERPs. Younger children and girls were characterized by increased posterror slowing, although they did not demonstrate improved posterror accuracy. Posterror slowing was also related to a larger Pe and reduced posterror accuracy. Collectively, these data suggest that posterror slowing may be unrelated to cognitive control and may, like the Pe, reflect an orienting response to errors.

Neural Correlates of Response Inhibition in Early Childhood: Evidence From a Go/No-Go Task

“…While several other studies utilizing similar task designs have examined ERN (Torpey et al, 2012, 2009), we were unable to do so in this study because the children made few errors. However, analyzing ERN could potentially give us additional insights into the development of response inhibition abilities in early childhood and future studies should undertake such an investigation.…”

“…Adopting a similar paradigm, another study with 5–6 year-olds reported that better response inhibition performance during negative emotional induction was accompanied by greater EEG power in the theta frequency range, though no differences in the N2 amplitude were seen (Farbiash & Berger, 2015). Several other studies have also incorporated EEG with the GNG paradigm to examine brain activity related to error detection and monitoring in 5 to 7-year-old children (Torpey, Hajcak, Kim, Kujawa, & Klein, 2012; Torpey, Hajcak, & Klein, 2009). These studies, however, did not look at the neural correlates associated with response inhibition in early childhood.…”

Compensated Dyslexics Have a More Efficient Error Detection System Than Noncompensated Dyslexics

“…Since the response-locked error-related negativity and correct-related negativity and stimulus-locked N100 components were maximal at the Cz and Fz electrodes, respectively, measurements of amplitude from these electrodes were used in the analyses. In line with previous published findings 28 we were interested in examining the degree of error-related negativity/correct-related negativity and N100 activation. Therefore, we focused on amplitude measurements.…”

Combining Neural and Behavioral Indicators in the Assessment of Internalizing Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents

“…Brain event-related potential (ERP) studies have identified the ERN as a robust marker of anterior cingulate cortex-mediated cognitive control processes invoked by performance errors (Holroyd & Coles, 2002;Yeung, Botvinick, & Cohen, 2004). The ERN is clearly evident in adolescents as well as adults (Davies, Segalowitz, & Gavin, 2004) and, more recently, has been observed in young children (i.e., ages 5-11; Kim, Iwaki, Imashioya, Uno, & Fujita, 2007;Torpey, Hajcak, Kim, Kujawa, & Klein, 2012;Wiersema, van der Meere, & Roeyers, 2007). The ERN thus represents a neurophysiological marker of cognitive control across development.…”