A Neuroscientific Perspective on Key Transitions in the Development of Cognitive Control

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Cognitive control (CC) describes a fundamental capacity: The ability to align our thoughts and behavior with our goals and context. A variety of outcomes, including physical health, criminal offending, and financial security (Moffitt et al., 2011), have been linked to development of CC in childhood. Age-related change in CC is supported by multiple developmental factors, including brain maturation, language development, the emergence of proactive control, and an improved capacity to flexibly bind and unbind stimulus features.
Consequently, this symposium explores recent work using neuroimaging/neurophysiological measures to better understand key developmental transitions that support CC improvements in childhood.
The first paper uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), to investigate whether the same brain regions that support inhibitory control in adulthood also support emerging inhibitory control in the first years of life. Also using fNIRS, the second paper investigates the role of language development, specifically examining the effect of learning dimensional labels on the activity of brain regions that support distinct dimensions of CC in toddlerhood. The third paper uses electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the neural markers of the transition from reactive to proactive CC in middle childhood in rule-switching tasks. The fourth paper uses hand tracking paired with EEG to study the neural correlates of flexibly binding stimulus features during middle childhood, when significant gains in this capacity have previously been observed.
Taken together, these papers present important insights gained from international research focused on multimethodological approaches to capturing key transitions in the development of cognitive control.

Sub Unit

• Biological Processes: Neuroscience and Genetics

Chair

• Christopher D Erb, University of Auckland

Individual Presentations

• Understanding the neural basis of inhibitory control in infancy using functional near-infrared spectroscopy - Presenting Author: Abigail Fiske, University of Oxford; Carina De Klerk; Katie Y. K. Lui; Liam Collins-Jones, UCL; Alexandra Hendry, University of Oxford; Isobel Greenhalgh; Anna Hall; Gaia Scerif, University of Oxford; Henrik Dversgdal; Karla Holmboe, University of Oxford

• Dimensional label learning impacts the development of cognitive control - Presenting Author: Aaron T. Buss, University of Tennessee - Knoxville; Alexis McCraw; Hollis Heim; Jacqueline Sullivan, Nationwide Children’s Hospital; Rachel Eddings

• Patterns of neural oscillations associated with proactive control in children and adults - Presenting Author: Nicolas Chevalier, University of Edinburgh; Aurélien Frick, Université de Liège, Belgium; Yuko Munakata, University of California - Davis

• Development In Action: Using Hand Tracking to Capture Age-Related Improvements in Flexibility and Cognitive Control - Presenting Author: Katie Ann Smith, University of Auckland; Inanna K Haddon; Paul M Corballis; Christopher D Erb, University of Auckland