Poster #42 - When do individual differences matter? Predicting children’s inhibitory control and responsiveness to interventions.

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Children differ greatly in their ability to inhibit inappropriate actions. What causes such variability, and what are the implications for interventions to support inhibitory control? Inhibition can be supported by proactive control, the ability to recruit control in advance of needing it, which can help in the detection of signals indicating the need to inhibit a behavior. Consequently, children who are more proactive may show better inhibitory control, and may differ in their responsiveness to interventions, compared to children who are less proactive.

We investigated how individual differences in proactive control and baseline inhibition in 7-8 year old children predicted performance on a Stop Signal Task following an intervention or control condition. Proactive control was measured in terms of a proactive behavioral index on an AX-continuous performance task (AX-CPT), and inhibition was measured as accuracy on an anti-saccade task. Children then completed a Change Signal Task that provided training in one of four conditions: motoric-stopping, context monitoring (the ability to monitor an environment for signals), both motoric-stopping and context monitoring, or neither. Test performance was measured by estimating stop signal reaction time (SSRT) distributions.

Baseline individual differences among children predicted both inhibitory control at test and effects of training. The more proactive children were, the better their inhibitory control was (i.e., the faster their modal SSRTs) at test, regardless of training type (Fig. 1). In other words, children who recruited control in advance of needing it were better at inhibiting once a stop signal was presented, compared to less proactive children. Proactive control did not influence the effectiveness of training. In contrast, individual differences in children’s baseline inhibition interacted with training condition (context monitoring vs. controls) to predict inhibitory control at test (Fig. 2). Baseline inhibitory control predicted inhibitory control at test following control conditions, but not after context monitoring training. . Context monitoring training may have disrupted individual differences in inhibitory control by improving the stop signal performance of children with lower baseline inhibitory control. Variations in children’s inhibitory control can thus be understood in terms of stable individual differences in component processes such as proactive control, and the stability of individual differences can be disrupted by interventions that target context monitoring to improve inhibitory control.

Authors

• Hilary Joy Traut, University of Colorado Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Yuko Munakata, University of Colorado Boulder
  Non-Presenting Author