Neural correlates of cognitive control in childhood and adolescence: Disentangling the contributions of age and executive function
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 33 English-speaking children and adolescents (15 boys) between the ages of 7.17 and 16.75 years (mean = 11.87 years; S.D. = 2.76). All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and were free of any psychiatric diagnoses or medication. Participants were recruited through a local newspaper and paid $60.00 CDN plus a toy or gift certificate for their participation. An additional six participants were tested but eliminated from further analyses because they had fewer than
Behavioral analyses
Errors on the Go/Nogo task were controlled through the dynamic adjustment of stimulus duration, with better performance leading to shorter stimulus durations, so performance on the Go/Nogo task was measured by RTs on correct Go trials and also by stimulus duration. Go RTs below 200 ms or above 1000 ms were excluded from analysis because they were assumed to reflect non-deliberate behavior. Behavioral data from the Go/Nogo task and from the four measures of EF are summarized in Table 1. Simple and
Discussion
The frontal Nogo N2 is generally considered to be an index of cognitive control (e.g., Botvinick et al., 2001; Jodo & Kayama, 1992; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2003), reflecting neural generators in the ACC (e.g., Nieuwenhuis et al., 2003; van Veen & Carter, 2002) and orbitofrontal cortex (Bokura et al., 2001). Previous developmental research has shown that N2 amplitude and latency decrease with age (Davis et al., 2003, Johnstone et al., 2005, Jonkman et al., 2003, Lewis et al., in press, Rueda et al.,
Conclusion
This study attempted to disentangle the contributions of age and the development of EF to the frontal Nogo N2, an index of cognitive control in adults. Better performance on the IGT and the Stroop task was associated with higher N2 amplitudes, over and above effects of age, and N2 latencies decreased with age but were not predicted by EF. These findings suggest that age-related decreases in N2 amplitude, but not N2 latency, do indeed reflect the development of cognitive control and cannot be
Acknowledgements
Funding for this research was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH; R21 MH67357-01) and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR). We are also grateful for infrastructure support to PDZ from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). The authors would like to thank Jim Stieben, Danielle Savona, Angela Prencipe, Isabel Granic, and Sid Segalowitz for their valuable contributions to this project.
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