Poster #24 - Adaptive Coordination of Proactive and Reactive Cognitive Control Across Development

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Cognitive control improves dramatically across childhood. Young children tend to engage control reactively, in the moment it is needed, whereas older children and adults more often engage control proactively, in anticipation of needing it. What drives such developments? Many theories have focused on changes in children’s cognitive capacities, such as working memory (Munakata, Snyder, & Chatham, 2012). However, 5-year-old children, who tend to engage control reactively, will engage control proactively when reactive control is made more difficult (Chevalier et al., 2015). Such findings highlight the potential role of children’s developing sensitivity to variations in cognitive control demands in the environment and their adaptive coordination of their behavior in response.

To test developmental changes in adaptive coordination of behavior, we asked 5- and 10-year-olds and college-aged adults to complete a Demand Selection Task, in which they chose a proactive or a reactive deck to play on each trial. Each deck required participants to sort pictures based on their color or shape. The proactive deck showed the sorting rule before each picture, allowing participants to prepare to attend to a particular dimension before the picture appeared, whereas the reactive deck presented the sorting rule and picture simultaneously, preventing such preparation. After practicing both decks, participants were free to choose which deck they preferred to play over 50 trials. Significant age differences were observed in selections of the proactive deck (Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test, p=.03), primarily driven by 5-year-olds preferring to play the reactive deck (60% of trials) and adults preferring to play the proactive deck (67% of trials), suggesting that both 5-year-olds and adults coordinated behavior toward their age-preferred control modes (Figure 1).

To assess the potential basis for such choices, participants completed a questionnaire to assess sensitivity to and preferences for the different decks. Adults and 10-year-olds reported that the two decks differed, whereas 5-year-olds reported no differences between decks (p<.01). Significant age differences were also observed in reported deck preference (p=.02) and in reporting which deck was easier (p<.001), driven by adults significantly preferring the proactive deck and reporting it as easier and 5-year-olds significantly preferring the reactive deck and reporting it as easier. These results suggest that 5-year-olds developed overt deck preferences and adaptively coordinated their behavior away from the difficulty of the proactive deck, despite not detecting overall differences between decks. In contrast, adults coordinated their behavior toward the proactive deck in a manner that was consistent with their reports, but potentially inconsistent with adult tendencies to avoid unnecessary effort (Kool et al., 2011; Niebaum et al., 2018) and the hypothesized greater difficulty of proactive control relative to reactive control (Braver, 2012).

These results provide insight into the development of sensitivity to cognitive control demands and how adaptive responses to such demands change across development; even children as young as 5 years adapted behavior in accordance with preferred control modes. Further, these results highlight that the dramatic developments that children show in cognitive control may in part reflect their developing sensitivity to cognitive demands.

Authors

• Jesse Niebaum, University of Colorado, Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Nicolas Chevalier, University of Edinburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ryan Guild, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
  Non-Presenting Author

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