Poster #25 - Associations between context monitoring and response inhibition in 5-6 year- old children

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

How do children stop themselves from undesirable actions? Inhibitory control—the ability to stop a prepotent motoric, emotional, or cognitive response—may be supported by context monitoring—the ability to monitor the environment for cues that signal a need for control. Around 5 to 6 years of age, children show improvements in their ability to maintain information and prepare for effortful actions, gradually transitioning from primarily reactive to increasingly proactive control. During this transitional age, notable individual differences in children’s inhibitory control may be related to accompanying improvements in their context monitoring.
To examine this hypothesis, we explored associations between context monitoring and response inhibition—motoric inhibitory control—in 5-6 year-old children (N= 41). Children first performed a Double-Go task, a 2-choice reaction time task that required children to monitor for and respond quickly and accurately to infrequent signals by committing a double key-press. Because infrequent stimuli can trigger the automatic slowing of responses, examining the timing of this slowing and whether it impacted the first or second key-press allowed us to determine when signal detection occurred. We used the ratio of RT1-to-RT2 as an index of children's overall ability to detect and respond to a signal, as more slowed first key-presses (RT1) and faster second key-presses (RT2) reflect earlier signal detection and response. We then estimated individuals’ Time of Signal Detection (TOSD) via mixture modeling of the RT1-to-RT2 ratios, with smaller TOSDs indicating better context monitoring. Children also completed the Stop Signal Task (SST), and we employed a Bayesian parametric approach to obtain full distributions of their Stop Signal Reaction Times (SSRTs), a measure of response inhibition.
Analyses focused on relationships between children’s performance in the two tasks. First, as predicted, children who detected and responded faster to infrequent signals in the Double-Go task (i.e., had lower RT1-to-RT2 ratios) also exhibited marginally faster overall response inhibition in the SST (showed smaller mean SSRTs; Figure 1). Further, children’s TOSDs, our measure of context monitoring, positively correlated with the sigma parameter of their SSRT distributions, such that better context monitoring predicted more consistent SSRTs (Figure 2). These findings suggest that during this transitional age, context monitoring is associated with some aspects of inhibitory control. In particular, while children with better context monitoring may not necessarily demonstrate faster overall response inhibition, they do show less variation in their inhibitory responses. These findings encourage further investigation into different aspects of response inhibition to better understand their implications for real-world outcomes in childhood. We discuss follow up work examining these associations across development.

Authors

• Winnie Zhuang, University of Colorado Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Naomi Friedman, University of Colorado Boulder
  Non-Presenting Author

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