Poster #6 - Differentiation in Prefrontal Cortex Recruitment During Childhood: Insights from Cognitive Control Demands and Social Contexts

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Emerging cognitive control during childhood is largely supported by the development of distributed neural networks in which the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is central. Despite the widespread idea that cognitive control development reflects engagement of more control with age, it may instead reflect better and more flexible engagement of control to meet specific task demands (Chevalier, 2015). Furthermore, although cognitive control is often implemented in social contexts in which children interact with other individuals and/or actions are socially relevant, the influence of such social contexts on cognitive control engagement has been largely overlooked in children.
The present study used fNIRS to examine how PFC is recruited to support cognitive control in 5-6 and 8-9-year-old children, by (a) increasing inhibition and switching demands within the same task, and (b) manipulating the social context in which the task was performed (neutral, cooperative, or competitive), a factor that has been shown to influence cognitive control. Specifically, participants completed a task in which inhibition and switching demands were progressively introduced, in three social contexts: neutral, cooperative, and competitive.
Activation increased more in left than right PFC with cognitive control demands, and was lower during cooperative and competitive contexts, relative to neutral contexts. Importantly, this pattern was more pronounced in older than younger children. Thus, contrary to the widespread idea that progress in cognitive control reflects engagement of more control with age, we did not observe greater prefrontal cortex activation from early to middle childhood while children engaged cognitive control. Instead, prefrontal cortex recruitment was increasingly differentiated as a function of both varying task demands and social contexts with age, suggesting that cognitive control development reflects more flexible engagement of control, including greater release of prefrontal activation when demands decrease. An important implication is that interventions that foster better tailoring of control engagement according to task demands should be more effective than attempts to train cognitive control as a muscle.

Authors

• Nicolas Chevalier, University of Edinburgh
  Presenting Author

• Judith Jackson, University of Edinburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alexia Revueltas Roux, University of Edinburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yusuke Moriguchi, Kyoto University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Bonnie Auyeung, University of Edinburgh
  Non-Presenting Author