Predicting behavioral and brain markers of inhibitory control at preschool age from early measures of executive attention

Abstract

Inhibitory Control (IC) is the ability to prevent prepotent responses when inappropriate. Longitudinal research on IC development has mainly focused on early childhood and adolescence, while research on IC development in the first years of life is still scarce. In order to address this gap in literature, we explored the association between executive attention (EA) and elementary forms of IC in infancy and toddlerhood with individual differences IC later at 5 years of age. We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study in which children’s EA and IC (n=96) were tested at the age of 9 and 16-18 months, and at 2, 3 and 5 years. We expected that EA skills in infancy and toddlerhood would be related to better performance of children in IC tasks, together with a more mature inhibition-related brain functioning. Children performed a variety of age-appropriate EA and IC tasks in each wave measuring inhibition of attention, endogenous control of attention, inhibition of the response and conflict inhibition. At age 5 years, IC was measured with a Go/No-go task while recording event-related potentials. EA at 9 months was related to IC measures up to 3 years of age whereas EA at 16 months was associated with sustained attention during the Go/No-go task. Measures of IC at 2 years consistently predicted performance on the Go/No-go task at behavioral and neural levels. These results suggest that early emergence of IC relies on particular EA and basic IC skills providing further support to the hierarchical model of IC development.

Early executive function development: The first three years

“…However, these findings are limited by the fact that only one EF task -the A-not-B taskwas used at the earliest timepoints (5-and 10-months), which further stresses the need for more (and more targeted) measures of Early EFs to better reveal the developmental trajectories of EFs across this period. Others have shown even rudimentary aspects of early EFs, such as attentional control, predicted IC at 2-years, which in turn related to IC at 5-years (Conejero et al, 2023).…”

“…These hierarchical frameworks emphasize the role of the developing attention system, and how infants' developing capacity to direct and control their attention are foundational building blocks of more complex EF skills (see also Rothbart et al, 2007). Indeed, the ability to focus attention on an activity for a long period of time (Johansson et al, 2015) and the ability to direct attentional shifts between stimuli (Conejero et al, 2023) within the first year have been linked to later EF skills. In addition to attentional control, Hendry et al (2016) also describe how other EF-related domainsincluding processing speed and self-regulation -drive the development of EFs in the first three years.…”

“…To further mitigate the influence of non-EF demands such as motor and language ability, researchers in our field have employed new technologies in the development of EF tasks. More and more developmental researchers are turning to eye-tracking to assess EF and its attentional precursors (e.g., Conejero et al, 2023;Kovacs & Mehler, 2009). Infant gaze behaviour has long been investigated in the context of emerging EFs (e.g., Bell & Adams, 1999;Holmboe et al, 2008;Pelphrey et al, 2004) however one of the key benefits of eyetracking technology is that it can reduce the need to manually code looking behaviour, as gaze data can be automatically and continuously recorded and processed to provide the desired measures (e.g., looking time, saccadic reaction time).…”

Predicting behavioral and brain markers of inhibitory control at preschool age from early measures of executive attention

“…A sincere thank you to Alana Daly for the help improving the use of English in the manuscript. The pre-print of the current paper can be found available on PsyArXiv server under Conejero et al (2022).…”