Using Pupillometric Measures to Predict Individual Differences in Children’s Responsiveness to Inhibitory Control Interventions

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

Objective: We plan to examine whether individual differences in children’s cognitive effort exerted during the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT) predict benefits to inhibitory control following interventions. Proactive children tend to exert more effort (indexed by larger pupil dilation) during an early, anticipatory phase of AX-CPT trials after seeing a cue, whereas reactive children tend to exert more effort just prior to responding, after seeing a probe (Chatham et al., 2009). Pupil dilation varies greatly within- and between- subjects (Winn, Whitaker, Elliot, & Phillips, 1994), and individual differences in these measures may predict who benefits most from different interventions. Specifically, proactive profiles of effort may predict which children benefit most from interventions targeting proactive monitoring processes, but not which children benefit most from interventions targeting motoric stopping processes.

Methods: One-hundred-forty-six 7- to 9-year-old children completed a child-friendly adapted version of AX-CPT to measure proactive control (Chatham et al., 2009). Participants were presented with a cue (“A” or “B”) followed by a probe (“X” or “Y”) with 70% of the trials being A-X paired trials. They were instructed to make a target response (pressing button corresponding to smiley face) if the “A” cue was followed by the “X” probe. The remaining trials consisted of nontarget cue-probe pairings (A-Y, B-X, B-Y), each presented at a lower probability of the target pair (10% of total trials each). In these trials, participants were instructed to make a nontarget response (pressing button corresponding to frowny face). Next, they completed the inhibitory control intervention, which differed in proactive monitoring demand (High or Low) and action type (Stop or Go Again). They were asked to help ‘Mike’ land planes by pressing a button on the same side of the screen on which the plane appeared. Participants then completed a Stop-Signal Test, and were asked to help a baby monkey get bananas (similar to Chevalier et al., 2014) by pressing the button on the same side of the screen that the yellow banana appeared (No-Signal trials). If the banana turned brown, participants were instructed to stop and withhold their behavior. Pupil dilation measures were collected as indices of cognitive effort exerted during AX-CPT.

Analysis Plans: Pupil dilation will be calculated as percent change from baseline to account for individual differences in pupil diameter. Preprocessing and statistical analyses will be performed using R (R Core Team, 2020) and the “PupillometryR” package (Forbes, 2020). This R package allows us to use an established integrated pipeline to pre-process the pupillometric measures collected in our study and then apply analytic techniques of interest. We will use generalized additive mixed modeling (GAMMs; Hastie & Tibshirani, 1990; Lin & Zhang, 1999; Wood, 2011, 2017a) as this has been reported to be more powerful when analyzing features of pupil dilation signal directly. Data analyses will be completed before March 7, 2020.

Implications: If we can predict intervention benefits to children’s inhibitory control based on individual differences in cognitive control effort, these findings will inform theories of executive function and efforts to tailor cognitive interventions.

Authors

• Diego Placido, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Hilary Traut, University of Colorado Boulder
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yuko Munakata, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author