The influence of positive emotion and reward motivation on children’s cognitive control

• In Event: 1-109 - Executive functioning in emotional, motivational and social contexts

Integrative Statement

Traditionally, cognitive control has been investigated through a purely cognitive lens. Little is known about how affective contexts could influence cognitive control engagement in children even though, in everyday life, children often need to engage control in emotionally or motivationally relevant situations. For instance, children may refrain themselves to eat sweets in exchange for more pocket money to buy their favourite video game, or they may offer to help with some housework if they are a good mood. Importantly, previous research in adults indicate that emotion and motivation may not simply affect how much control is engaged but also the way it is temporally engaged, reactively (in response to events as they occur) or proactively (anticipating and preparing for upcoming events). Emotional and motivational factors may play a “scaffolding” role to promote the use of proactive control in young children who otherwise have a tendency to over-rely on reactive control.
The present study aimed to disentangle and directly compare the respective influences of emotion and motivation on childhood cognitive control, using a cued-task switching paradigm with younger children (5- to 6-year-old, M = 6.15 ± 0.42 years, n = 23), older children (9- to 10-year-old, M = 9.86 ± 0.67 years, n = 20) and young adults (M = 19.05 ± 0.32 years, n = 38). All participants completed three conditions. In the “affective” condition, stimuli were happy human faces, whereas neutral faces were used in the “neutral” and “motivational” conditions. Further, a reward (virtual candy) was provided after each correct response in the “motivational” condition.
Rewards increased children and adult’s accuracy in the “motivational” relative to the other conditions, but at the cost of slower responses. By comparing reaction times in early-cued blocks (proactive possible) and in simultaneously-cued blocks (reactive only), we found that positive stimuli in the “affective” condition promoted proactive control engagement in younger children, who otherwise engaged reactive control in the other conditions. Although both older children and young adults engaged proactive control across all conditions, young adults showed overall lower performance in the “motivational” condition.
Taken together, these findings show that positive emotional contexts promote the engagement of proactive control in younger children, while motivational contexts (i.e., presence of rewards) are detrimental to older adults. Therefore, emotion and motivation do affect control engagement, albeit in different ways throughout development. These findings not only help us to better understand how cognitive control develops and works across different emotional and motivational contexts, but also have important societal implications for educational fields, suggesting that younger children may engage more mature forms of control in moments of enjoyment and adults may be distracted by the expectation of reward.

Authors

• Xiaoyu Jin, University of Edinburgh
  Presenting Author

• Nicolas Chevalier, University of Edinburgh
  Non-Presenting Author