Poster #7 - Relationships between Behavioral Performance and Neural Processes of Inhibitory Control in Children

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Inhibitory control is a skill that develops rapidly as children get older (e.g., Espy, 1997; Lo et al., 2013). Inhibition requires multiple skills working in concert, including suppressing a prepotent response, selectively attending to target stimuli while ignoring distracting stimuli that may impact responses, and shifting attention from one task to a new task with similar information and not allowing the similar information to impact responses (Friedman & Miyake, 2004). Importantly, better inhibitory control skills have been found to be associated with better long-term outcomes, such as academic performance (e.g., McClelland et al., 2014). While previous studies have evaluated inhibitory control skills in children, it is important to evaluate various aspects of inhibitory control within the same child. The aim of the current study is to determine relationships between different aspects of inhibitory control in preschool- and school-age children.
Participants include 4- to 8-year-old children who are native, monolingual speakers of English, with normal hearing and vision, no history of neurological disorders, and exhibit age-appropriate nonverbal IQ and language skills. All participants completed two tasks: 1) A Go/No-Go Task (Grammer, Carrasco, Gehring, & Morrison, 2014); 2) Shape School (Espy, 1997).
For the Go/No-Go task, participants were shown images of animals on a screen (Grammer et al., 2014). Using a controller, participants were instructed to press a button as quickly as possible when they saw all animal images (Go) except for three specific animals. For these three animals, participants were instructed to withhold their responses (No-Go). Thus, this task measured the aspect of inhibitory control that requires suppressing prepotent responses. Neural responses (event-related brain potentials [ERPs]) and behavioral performance were acquired for this nonverbal task.
The Shape School task was administered to all participants and presented using a computer with a narrative context (Espy, 1997). Shape School involves five tasks. The first task involved naming colors, followed by inhibiting color naming for specific stimuli. The third task switched rules to naming shapes instead of colors, while the fourth task involved switching between naming colors and shapes. The final task involved switching between naming shapes and colors while inhibiting responses to specific color and shape stimuli. All participants completed the first four tasks and, if they successfully completed color-shape switching, they were administered the final task. This task measured multiple aspects of inhibitory control, including suppressing a prepotent response, shifting attention to a new task/rule structure, and making responses without allowing distracting information or previously known similar information/rules to affect responses.
Data collection and analyses are ongoing. Preliminary results suggest differentiated relationships between performance on Go and No-Go portions of the Go/No-Go task, the Shape School inhibition tasks, and the Shape School switching tasks. Preliminary findings suggest that different portions of these tasks tap into various aspects of inhibitory skills in typically developing children. Furthermore, better understanding of these relationships in typical development will serve as a comparison for future studies of inhibitory control in children with atypical development, such as communication disorders.

Authors

• Erica Lescht, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Amanda Hampton Wray, Michigan State University
  Non-Presenting Author