Biological psychology
-
Biological psychology · Oct 2018
Weak proactive cognitive/motor brain control accounts for poor children's behavioral performance in speeded discrimination tasks.
Motor and inhibitory control rely on frontal cortex activity, which is known to reach full maturation only in late adolescence. The development of inhibitory control has been studied using event-related potentials (ERP), focusing on reactive processing (i.e. the N2 and the P3 components). Scarce information exists concerning pre-stimulus activity as that represented by the Bereinshafstpotential (BP) and by the prefrontal negativity (pN). Further, no literature exists concerning the post-stimulus components originating within the anterior insula (pN1, pP1, pP2). This study aims at associating children performance with these motor-cognitive processing in frontal brain areas. ⋯ Our results demonstrate that children are characterized by less intense task-related proactive activities in frontal cortex, which may account for subsequent poor and delayed reactive processing and, thus, for inaccurate and slow performance.