Neural dynamics underlying coherent motion perception in children and adults

Abstract

Motion sensitivity increases during childhood, but little is known about the underlying neural correlates. Most studies investigating children’s evoked responses have not dissociated direction-specific and non-direction-specific responses. To isolate direction-specific responses, we presented coherently moving dot stimuli preceded by a period of incoherent motion, to 6- to 7-year-olds (n = 34), 8- to 10-year-olds (n = 34), 10- to 12-year-olds (n = 34) and adults (n = 20). Participants reported the direction of coherent motion while high-density EEG was recorded. Using a data-driven approach, we identified two stimulus-locked EEG components with distinct topographies: an early component with an occipital topography and a later, sustained positive component over centro-parietal electrodes. The component waveforms showed clear age-related differences, and scaled with motion coherence. In the early, occipital component, all groups showed a negativity peaking at ~300ms, like the previously reported coherent-motion N2. However, the children, unlike adults, showed an additional positive peak at ~200ms. The later positive response in the centro-parietal component rose more steeply for adults than for the youngest children, likely reflecting age-related changes in decision-making. These results suggest that children’s protracted development of coherent motion sensitivity is associated with gradual maturation of both early sensory and later decision-related processes.

Perceptual decision-making in children: Age-related differences and EEG correlates

“…The second most reliable component was instead maximal over occipital electrodes. The topographies of these components were similar to the stimulus-locked components identified using the same data by Manning et al (2019). The slope of ramping activity in both components became steeper as a function of age.…”

“…Four further child participants were removed as only 3.7%, 39.0%, 53.6% and 55.9% of their data survived data cleaning using the Exponential Weighted Moving Average method (see below), suggesting that they were making a high proportion of fast guesses. Our analysis used the same dataset that has been analysed previously in a study focusing on children's electrophysiological responses locked to the onset of coherent motion (Manning et al, 2019).…”

“…The data were pre-processed as described in Manning et al (2019; for preprocessing scripts see https://osf.io/fkjt6/). Briefly, the data were epoched into trials, and the data from each trial were median-corrected for DC offsets.…”

“…As in Manning et al (2019), we used a dimensionality reduction techniquereliable components analysis (RCA; Dmochowski et al, 2012;Dmochowski et al, 2014; Dmochowski & Norcia, 2015)to identify components that maximised spatiotemporal trialto-trial reliability. These components are sets of electrode weights that can be projected through a forward-model projection to visualise components as scalp topographies (Haufe et al, 2014;Parra et al, 2005).…”

Global motion evoked potentials in autistic and dyslexic children: a cross-syndrome approach

“…In this case, only the N2, but not the P1, is observable after the coherent motion onset (Nieddegen & Wist, 1999), suggesting that the N2 is motion-specific, whereas P1 is sensitive to luminance contrast (Clifford and Ibbotson, 2003;Heinrich, 2007;Niedeggen & Wist, 1999). Manning et al (2019) used this paradigm to measure visual evoked potentials to coherent motion in 6-to 12-year-old typically developing children and adults. They used a dimensionality reduction technique, Reliable Components Analysis (RCA; Dmochowski et al, 2012;Dmochowski et al, 2014;Dmochowski & Norcia, 2015), which maximises trial-totrial reliability across participants.…”