The Impact of School Experience on Cognitive Control Processes

• In Event: Causal Impacts of Schooling on Children’s Cognitive and Brain Development

Abstract

Cognitive control develops rapidly across the transition into elementary school, however the extent to which these changes reflect age-related maturation or are shaped by contextual experiences for individual children is less clear. The impact of early school experiences on domain-specific and domain general skills has been well documented by studies that employ quasi-experimental methods to examine the impact of going to school on children’s abilities (Morrison, Kim, Connor, & Grammer, 2019). Growing evidence drawn from school-cutoff studies - natural experiments involving a pre-post design to compare changes in the skills of children with birthdays that just made or missed the school cutoff date - suggests that experience in early classroom settings contributes to behavioral measures of cognitive control (Burrage, et al., 2008) and the neural correlates of these skills (Brod, Bunge, Shing, 2017). However more work is needed to specify the impact of school on children’s cognitive development.
The regression discontinuity design (RDD) similarly allows for causal inference regarding the impact of school on particular outcomes, however these methods are rarely applied to neuroscientific data due to sample size limitations. Electrophysiological methods are particularly well suited to examine the neural correlates of cognitive control processes in large populations of children. Researchers interested in the development of cognitive control have focused on ERP components that reflect a network of structures, including the anterior cingulate cortex and lateral prefrontal cortex, involved in detecting response conflict and attention control. Of specific interest are ERPs observed when children process stimuli that reflect conflicting demands of the tasks including the medial-frontal N2 potentials and frontal P3 potentials that follow them as well as components are those associated with the responses to stimuli in conflict tasks: the error-related negativity (ERN), a medial-frontal negativity similar to the N2, and error positivity (Pe).
Focusing on error monitoring ERPs, using the RDD approach, we have previously provided preliminary evidence for the impact of experience in early elementary school on the Pe (Morrison et al., 2019). In this presentation, our goal is to replicate and extend this work. Specifically, we will draw on a novel data set including EEG and behavioral measures drawn from 753 children, collected across 5 investigations, who participated in the same Go/No-go Zoo Game (Grammer et al., 2014). First we will present a replication of RDD analyses for both error monitoring components, the ERN and the Pe. Following this replication, we extend on these analyses by examining the impact of schooling on ERPs reflecting stimulus processing. To this end we will first describe the stimulus-locked components drawn from this task, characterizing them in the context of the broader developmental literature and describing them in relation to children’s behavior. Then we will examine the impact of schooling on stimulus processing. We will describe these results in light of child characteristics including gender. Finally we will discuss strategies for, and benefits of, developing and maintaining shared EEG data sets, as well as the challenges associated with applying novel analytic approaches to EEG data.

Authors

• Jennie K Grammer, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Presenting Author

• Elif Isbell, University of California Merced
  Non-Presenting Author

• Matthew H Kim, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author

• William Gehring, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chad Hazlett, University of California, Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author

• Frederick J Morrison, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author