The influence of reward anticipation on conflict control in children and adolescents: Evidences from hierarchical drift-diffusion model and event-related potentials.

Reward is deemed a performance reinforcer. The current study investigated how social and monetary reward anticipation affected cognitive control in 39 children, 40 adolescents, and 40 adults. We found that cognitive control performance improved with age in a Simon task, and the reaction time (RT) was modulated by the reward magnitude. The conflict monitoring process (target N2 amplitudes) of adolescents and the attentional control processes (target P3 amplitudes) of adolescents and adults could be adjusted by reward magnitude, suggesting that adolescents were more sensitive to rewards compared to children. Reward magnitudes influenced the neural process of attentional control with larger P3 in congruent trails than that in incongruent trials only in low reward condition. The result of hierarchical drift-diffusion model indicated that children had slower drift rates, higher decision threshold, and longer non-decision time than adolescents and adults. Adolescents had faster drift rates in monetary task than in social task under the high reward condition, and they had faster drift rates under high reward condition than no reward condition only in the monetary task. The correlation analysis further showed that adults' non-decision time and decision threshold correlated with conflict monitoring process (N2 responses) and attentional control process on conflicts (P3 responses). Adolescents' drift rates associated with neural process of attentional control. The current study reveals that reward magnitude and reward type can modulate cognitive control process, especially in adolescents.

The neurodevelopment of delay discounting for monetary rewards in pre-adolescent children.

Children are found to exhibit high degrees of delay discounting compared with adults in many delay discounting studies, which might be due to the asynchronous development of "bottom-up" and "top-down" neural systems. However, the temporal dynamics associated with the two systems in the development of delay discounting processes are not well known. In this study, we chose two age groups of participants and adopted event-related potential (ERP) techniques to investigate the neural dynamic differences between children and adults during delay discounting processes. Behavioral findings showed that children discounted more than adults and chose more immediate choices. Electrophysiological findings revealed that children exhibited longer neural processing (longer P2 latency) than adults during the early detection and identification phase. Children showed less cognitive control (smaller N2 amplitude) than adults over the middle frontal areas, and they devoted more neural effort (larger P3 amplitudes) to making final choices than adults. The factors of reward amount and time delay could influence the development of delay discounting in children.

Fluid intelligence and neural mechanisms of emotional conflict adaptation.

Emotional conflict adaptation is an important process of cognitive control in human behavioral regulation. The face-word Stroop task and the emotional Simon task were employed to explore the correlation between fluid intelligence and neural processes of emotional conflict adaptation using event-related potential (ERP) techniques. Thirty-two intellectually average children (mean age of 10.72 years) and thirty-four intellectually gifted children (mean age of 10.86 years) participated in the present study. The behavioral results indicated that both intellectually gifted and average children showed reliable emotional conflict adaptation effects (CAEs) on reaction times (RTs) and error rates. However, the two IQ groups differed in the magnitude of error rates during emotional conflict adaptation. The electrophysiological results further revealed that the IQ differences in emotional conflict adaptation were mainly associated with emotional conflict detection processes as demonstrated by the frontal N2-CAE values. The two IQ groups did not differ in early P3 or late P3 responses during emotional conflict resolution processes. The gifted and average children showed different patterns during cognitive control processes when facing emotional Simon conflicts and emotional Stroop conflicts. The current study emphasizes the importance of frontal function during cognitive control of emotional information from the perspective of individual differences.

Neural Dynamic Responses of Monetary and Social Reward Processes in Adolescents.

Adolescence is an essential developmental period characterized by reward-related processes. The current study investigated the development of monetary and social reward processes in adolescents compared with that in children and adults; furthermore, it assessed whether adolescents had different levels of sensitivity to various types of rewards. Two adapted incentive delay tasks were employed for each participant, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The behavioral results showed that both monetary and social rewards could motivate response speed, and participants were more accurate under the monetary reward condition than under the social reward condition. The behavioral performances of individuals increased with age. For the ERP data, the cue-P3, target-P2, target-P3 and feedback-related negativity (FRN) components were investigated to identify reward motivation, emotional arousal, attention allocation and feedback processing. Children and adolescents showed higher motivation (larger cue-P3) to rewards than adults. Adolescents showed larger emotional responses to rewards; that is, they had larger target-P2 amplitudes than adults and shorter target-P2 latencies than children. Children showed stronger emotional reactivity for monetary rewards than for social rewards. All age groups had stronger attentional control (larger target-P3) under the monetary reward condition than under the social reward condition. The present study sheds light on the neurodevelopment of reward processes in children, adolescents and adults and shows that various reward process stages demonstrate different age-related and reward-type-related characteristics.

Food is discounted more steeply than money: Evidence from N2 and P3 responses in delay discounting tasks.

In decision making, different rewards such as money and food may lead to different behavioral outcomes and neural dynamics. In this study, we used event-related potential (ERP) techniques and delay discounting tasks with money and snacks as rewards to determine whether there are differences in behavior and neurophysiology across the two tasks. The results showed that participants not only behaved differently but also showed different neural patterns in the money and snack tasks. In particular, at the behavioral level, participants discounted snacks more than money. At the neural level, the N2 amplitudes in the snack task were more negative than those in the money task. It was also discovered that for females, the amplitudes of P3 in the snack task were larger than those in money, while there was no difference for males. The current study showed the essential roles of frontal cognitive control function during varied delay discounting processes on money and food rewards.

Development of neural mechanisms in emotional conflict adaptation: A comparison of children, adolescents, and young adults.

OBJECTIVE: This study explored behavioral and electrophysiological age-related changes in conflict adaptation to emotional stimuli among children, adolescents, and young adults. METHOD: Children (N = 35, Mage = 10.72 years), adolescents (N = 35, Mage = 13.34 years), and young adults (N = 30, Mage = 21.82 years) were administered cognitive control tasks on emotional stimulus-stimulus (S-S) conflict and stimulus-response (S-R) conflict while event-related potential (ERP) signals were recorded. RESULTS: The behavioral results (response time [RT] and error rate) showed that all age groups exhibited reliable conflict adaptation effect (CAE) to emotional stimuli, and conflict adaptation performance improved with age. A similar developmental pattern was observed when the ERP magnitudes of the CAE to emotional stimuli (N2 amplitude, N2 latency, and early P3 latency) were compared. Participants performed better on conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli when compared with the S-R stimuli (RT-CAE, N2 amplitude-CAE and late P3 amplitude-CAE), and only children performed better conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli than on S-R stimuli in terms of error rates. CONCLUSION: Children, adolescents, and young adults all presented reliable behavioral and electrophysiological conflict adaptation to emotional stimuli, and participants exhibited improved performance on conflict adaptation with age across the 3 age groups in emotional contexts. Moreover, all the age groups showed distinct cognitive control of emotional S-S and S-R conflict, and conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli may mature earlier than S-R conflict. This study offers insight into how the processing of emotional stimuli affects cognitive control processes from a developmental perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Conflict Adaptation in 5-Year-Old Preschool Children: Evidence From Emotional Contexts.

This research investigated the individual behavioral and electrophysiological differences during emotional conflict adaptation processes in preschool children. Thirty children (16 girls, mean age 5.44 ± 0.28 years) completed an emotional Flanker task (stimulus-stimulus cognitive control, S-S) and an emotional Simon task (stimulus-response cognitive control, S-R). Behaviorally, the 5-year-old preschool children exhibited reliable congruency sequence effects (CSEs) in the emotional contexts, with faster response times (RTs) and lower error rates in the incongruent trials preceded by an incongruent trial (iI trial) than in the incongruent trials preceded by a congruent trial (cI trial). Regarding electrophysiology, the children demonstrated longer N2 and P3 latencies in the incongruent trials than in the congruent trials during emotional conflict control processes. Importantly, the boys showed a reliable CSE of N2 amplitude when faced with fearful target expression. Moreover, 5-year-old children showed better emotional CSEs in response to happy targets than to fearful targets as demonstrated by the magnitude of CSEs in terms of the RT, error rate, N2 amplitude and P3 latency. In addition, the results demonstrated that 5-year-old children processed S-S emotional conflicts and S-R emotional conflicts differently and performed better on S-S emotional conflicts than on S-R emotional conflicts according to the comparison of the RT-CSE and P3 latency-CSE values. The current study provides insight into how emotionally salient stimuli affect cognitive processes among preschool children.

The Relationships Among Testosterone, Cortisol, and Cognitive Control of Emotion as Underlying Mechanisms of Emotional Intelligence of 10- to 11-Year-Old Children.

Emotional intelligence is an important factor contributing to social adaptation. The current study investigated how salivary testosterone (T) and cortisol (C) levels, cognitive control of emotional conflict processing were associated with children's emotional intelligence (EI). Thirty-four 10- to 11-year-old children were enrolled and instructed to complete questionnaires on emotional intelligence as well as empirical tasks of emotional flanker and Stroop with event-related potential (ERP) recordings. Saliva collection took place on another day without ERP tasks. Results showed that lower T and C levels were associated with higher accuracy in emotional conflict tasks, as well as better emotional intelligence (managing self emotions). In the Stroop task, higher T/C ratios were associated with greater congruency effects of N2 latencies, and lower cortisol levels correlated with stronger slow potential activities (SP). For girls, the correlation between cortisol and emotional utilization was mediated by the SP amplitudes on fearful conflicts in the flanker task (95% CI: -8.64, -0.54, p < 0.050). In conclusion, the current study found the relationship between cortisol and an emotional intelligence ability, emotional utilization, might be mediated by brain activities during emotional conflict resolution processing (SP responses) in preadolescent girls. Future studies could further investigate testosterone-cortisol interaction and its relation with cognitive control of emotion as underlying mechanisms of emotional intelligence.

Conflict control of emotional and non-emotional conflicts in preadolescent children.

Conflict control refers to an individual's goal-directed cognitive control and self-regulation of behavior. The neurodevelopment related to conflict control is crucial for the development of cognitive and emotional abilities in children. In the current study, preadolescent children and adults completed the Simon and Stroop tasks in emotional and non-emotional contexts with simultaneous electroencephalography recordings. The behavioral findings showed that adults had faster response speed and better conflict control performance compared to children. Children's accuracy was affected by the emotional context, whereby children had a lower accuracy in the emotional contexts compared to the non-emotional contexts. Adults had similar performances in both contexts. During the neural processes of conflict detection and conflict resolution, children had longer N2 latencies for conflict detection, and devoted more neural efforts with larger P3 amplitudes to execute resolution control on the conflicts than adults. Moreover, both age groups' reaction times (RT) were shorter in the Simon task than in the Stroop task in the non-emotional context, while, RTs were longer in the Simon task than in the Stroop task in the emotional context. Children showed larger P3 responses in the Simon task than in the Stroop task in the emotional contexts, while adults showed no such differences. The current findings demonstrate that children have immature neurodevelopment of conflict control compared to adults, and their cognitive control processes on conflicts were distracted by the emotional contexts. Children's emotional conflict control processes were also affected by the characteristic of conflict types, and they need to devote more neural effort to process Simon-like conflicts than Stroop-like conflicts compared to adults.

An event-related brain potential study of children's conservation.

To investigate the relationship between cortical activation and conservation ability, 22 children were divided into two groups based on their performance on a standard Piagetian Conservation test. Visual evoked potentials were recorded while children performed a weight conservation task. A bilateral, frontal-distributed, broad late positive component at 900 ms differed between non-conserving and conserving children, with non-conservers having a larger amplitude. The significant interaction between conservation ability and hemisphere on the amplitude of this component suggests that inferior generators gradually move from central to right frontal-central while conservation level increases. The results indicate the existence of an ERP component that reflects weight conservation ability in children and a possible relationship between conservation ability and brain activation.

Neurodevelopment of conflict adaptation: Evidence from event-related potentials.

Conflict adaptation is key in how children self-regulate and assert cognitive control in a given situation compared with a previous experience. In the current study, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify age-related differences in conflict adaptation. Participants of different ages (5-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults) were subjected to a stimulus-stimulus (S-S) conflict control task (the flanker task) and a stimulus-response (S-R) conflict control task (the Simon task). The behavioral results revealed that all age groups had reliable conflict adaptation effects (CAEs), with faster response times on current incongruent trials preceded by incongruent trials (iI trials) compared with current incongruent trials preceded by congruent trials (cI trials). There were also faster response times on current congruent trials preceded by congruent trials (cC trials) compared with current congruent trials preceded by incongruent trials (iC trials). Moreover, children demonstrated higher CAE related RTs compared with adults. Electrophysiological results showed that both 10-year-old children and adults had reliable CAEs in the flanker task during conflict detection, with a less N2 amplitude on cI trials compared with iI trials. We also found smaller ERP related CAE values in adults compared with children in the Simon task. Our findings suggest a developmental improvement of conflict adaptation that could lead to a state of relative equilibrium, allowing individuals to better assimilate and accommodate potential environmental conflicts. The results may also indicate that the development of conflict adaption is affected by the specific characteristic of the different types of conflict. (PsycINFO Database Record

Neural mechanisms of auditory sensory processing in children with high intelligence.

To investigate the differences in event-related potential parameters related to children's intelligence, 18 intellectually gifted children and 18 average children participated in this study. The electroencephalograms were recorded the auditory sensory memory that elicited the mismatch negativity (MMN) and late discriminative negativity (LDN), as well as involuntary attention switch that elicited the P3a and early MMN were analyzed. The results indicated that children with high intelligence had comparatively larger MMN, LDN, early MMN, P3a amplitudes, and earlier peak latency in LDN than average children. The enhanced neural function of the intellectually gifted children might be due to more spatially and temporally coordinated neural network, faster neural processing speed and more efficient neural activation functions.

Development of Monetary and Social Reward Processes.

The current study investigated monetary and social reward processing in children, adolescents and adults with adapted incentive-delay tasks and self-report questionnaires. Both tasks had three levels of reward magnitudes (no, low, and high). Qualified participants received 15 Chinese Yuan and an honor certificate as monetary and social rewards, respectively. The results indicated that both monetary and social rewards effectively speeded up responses for all three age groups as reward magnitude increased in the choice reaction time task. Among adolescents and adults, males exhibited faster responses in high reward than in low reward condition, while females responded equally fast in both conditions. Among children, girls responded faster to high reward than low reward condition. However, boys committed more errors than girls in low and high reward conditions, and they had exhibited more errors in high reward than that in no reward condition for social reward. Regarding the subjective ratings, both children and adolescents reported higher motivation for social reward than for monetary reward. These findings indicated that the males in the adolescent and adult groups were more sensitive to reward than were the females. Moreover, tangible and quantitative social reward had stronger incentive power than monetary reward among children and adolescents.

Neural Correlates of Response Inhibition and Conflict Control on Facial Expressions.

Response inhibition and conflict control on affective information can be regarded as two important emotion regulation and cognitive control processes. The emotional Go/Nogo flanker paradigm was adopted and participant's event-related potentials (ERPs) were analyzed to investigate how response inhibition and conflict control interplayed. The behavioral findings revealed that participants showed higher accuracy to identify happy faces in congruent condition relative to that in incongruent condition. The electrophysiological results manifested that response inhibition and conflict control interplayed during the detection/conflict monitoring stage, and Nogo-N2 was more negative in the incongruent trials than the congruent trials. With regard to the inhibitory control/conflict resolution stage, Nogo responses induced greater frontal P3 and parietal P3 responses than Go responses did. The difference waveforms of N2 and parietal P3 showed that response inhibition and conflict control had distinct processes, and the multiple responses requiring both conflict control and response inhibition processes induced stronger monitoring and resolution processes than conflict control. The current study manifested that response inhibition and conflict control on emotional information required separable neural mechanisms during emotion regulation processes.

The Correlation among Neural Dynamic Processing of Conflict Control, Testosterone and Cortisol Levels in 10-Year-Old Children.

Cognitive control is related to goal-directed self-regulation abilities, which is fundamental for human development. Conflict control includes the neural processes of conflict monitoring and conflict resolution. Testosterone and cortisol are essential hormones for the development of cognitive functions. However, there are no studies that have investigated the correlation of these two hormones with conflict control in preadolescents. In this study, we aimed to explore whether testosterone, cortisol, and testosterone/cortisol ratio worked differently for preadolescent's conflict control processes in varied conflict control tasks. Thirty-two 10-year-old children (16 boys and 16 girls) were enrolled. They were instructed to accomplish three conflict control tasks with different conflict dimensions, including the Flanker, Simon, and Stroop tasks, and electrophysiological signals were recorded. Salivary samples were collected from each child. The testosterone and cortisol levels were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The electrophysiological results showed that the incongruent trials induced greater N2/N450 and P3/SP responses than the congruent trials during neural processes of conflict monitoring and conflict resolution in the Flanker and Stroop tasks. The hormonal findings showed that (1) the testosterone/cortisol ratio was correlated with conflict control accuracy and conflict resolution in the Flanker task; (2) the testosterone level was associated with conflict control performance and neural processing of conflict resolution in the Stroop task; (3) the cortisol level was correlated with conflict control performance and neural processing of conflict monitoring in the Simon task. In conclusion, in 10-year-old children, the fewer processes a task needs, the more likely there is an association between the T/C ratios and the behavioral and brain response, and the dual-hormone effects on conflict resolution may be testosterone-driven in the Stroop and Flanker tasks.

Automatic Change Detection to Facial Expressions in Adolescents: Evidence from Visual Mismatch Negativity Responses.

Adolescence is a critical period for the neurodevelopment of social-emotional processing, wherein the automatic detection of changes in facial expressions is crucial for the development of interpersonal communication. Two groups of participants (an adolescent group and an adult group) were recruited to complete an emotional oddball task featuring on happy and one fearful condition. The measurement of event-related potential was carried out via electroencephalography and electrooculography recording, to detect visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) with regard to the automatic detection of changes in facial expressions between the two age groups. The current findings demonstrated that the adolescent group featured more negative vMMN amplitudes than the adult group in the fronto-central region during the 120-200 ms interval. During the time window of 370-450 ms, only the adult group showed better automatic processing on fearful faces than happy faces. The present study indicated that adolescent's posses stronger automatic detection of changes in emotional expression relative to adults, and sheds light on the neurodevelopment of automatic processes concerning social-emotional information.

Fluid Intelligence and Automatic Neural Processes in Facial Expression Perception: An Event-Related Potential Study.

The relationship between human fluid intelligence and social-emotional abilities has been a topic of considerable interest. The current study investigated whether adolescents with different intellectual levels had different automatic neural processing of facial expressions. Two groups of adolescent males were enrolled: a high IQ group and an average IQ group. Age and parental socioeconomic status were matched between the two groups. Participants counted the numbers of the central cross changes while paired facial expressions were presented bilaterally in an oddball paradigm. There were two experimental conditions: a happy condition, in which neutral expressions were standard stimuli (p = 0.8) and happy expressions were deviant stimuli (p = 0.2), and a fearful condition, in which neutral expressions were standard stimuli (p = 0.8) and fearful expressions were deviant stimuli (p = 0.2). Participants were required to concentrate on the primary task of counting the central cross changes and to ignore the expressions to ensure that facial expression processing was automatic. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained during the tasks. The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) components were analyzed to index the automatic neural processing of facial expressions. For the early vMMN (50-130 ms), the high IQ group showed more negative vMMN amplitudes than the average IQ group in the happy condition. For the late vMMN (320-450 ms), the high IQ group had greater vMMN responses than the average IQ group over frontal and occipito-temporal areas in the fearful condition, and the average IQ group evoked larger vMMN amplitudes than the high IQ group over occipito-temporal areas in the happy condition. The present study elucidated the close relationships between fluid intelligence and pre-attentive change detection on social-emotional information.

Neural mechanism of facial expression perception in intellectually gifted adolescents.

The current study investigated the relationship between general intelligence and the three stages of facial expression processing. Two groups of adolescents with different levels of general intelligence were required to identify three types of facial expressions (happy, sad, and neutral faces), which were presented with either inverted or upright orientation. Participants' response times and accuracy were measured and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to evaluate neural dynamic processes. The behavioral results showed that high IQ adolescents exhibited shorter response times than average IQ adolescents during the facial expression identification task. The electrophysiological responses showed that no significant IQ-related differences were found for P1 responses during the early visual processing stage. During the middle processing stage, high IQ adolescents had faster structural encoding of inverted faces (shorter N170 latencies) compared to their average IQ peers, and they also showed better structural encoding of sad faces, with larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes than for neutral faces. During the late processing stage, adolescents with high IQ showed better attentional modulation, with larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes compared to adolescents with average IQ. The current study revealed that adolescents with different intellectual levels used different neural dynamic processes during these three stages in the processing of facial expressions.

Response inhibition, preattentive processing, and sex difference in young children: an event-related potential study.

Response inhibition and preattentive processing are two important cognitive abilities for child development, and the current study adopted both behavioral and electrophysiological protocols to examine whether young children's response inhibition correlated with their preattentive processing. A Go/Nogo task was used to explore young children's response inhibition performances and an Oddball task with event-related potential recordings was used to measure their preattentive processing. The behavioral results showed that girls committed significantly fewer commission error rates, which showed that girls had stronger inhibition control abilities than boys. Girls also achieved higher d' scores in the Go/Nogo task, which indicated that they were more sensitive to the stimulus signals than boys. Although the electrophysiological results of preattentive processing did not show any sex differences, the correlation patterns between children's response inhibition and preattentive processing were different between these two groups: the neural response speed of preattentive processing (mismatch negativity peak latency) negatively correlated with girls' commission error rates and positively correlated with boys' correct hit rates. The current findings supported that the preattentive processing correlated with human inhibition control performances, and further showed that girls' better inhibition responses might be because of the influence of their preattentive processing.