Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, TU Dresden, Cognitive Neurophysiology, Germany.
Experimental Neurobiology, National Institute of Mental Health, Klecany, Czech Republic.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2017 Oct;38(10):4933-4945. doi: 10.1002/hbm.23705. Epub 2017 Jun 28.
Many everyday tasks require executive functions to achieve a certain goal. Quite often, this requires the integration of information derived from different sensory modalities. Children are less likely to integrate information from different modalities and, at the same time, also do not command fully developed executive functions, as compared to adults. Yet still, the role of developmental age-related effects on multisensory integration processes has not been examined within the context of multicomponent behavior until now (i.e., the concatenation of different executive subprocesses). This is problematic because differences in multisensory integration might actually explain a significant amount of the developmental effects that have traditionally been attributed to changes in executive functioning. In a system, neurophysiological approach combining electroencephaloram (EEG) recordings and source localization analyses, we therefore examined this question. The results show that differences in how children and adults accomplish multicomponent behavior do not solely depend on developmental differences in executive functioning. Instead, the observed developmental differences in response selection processes (reflected by the P3 ERP) were largely dependent on the complexity of integrating temporally separated stimuli from different modalities. This effect was related to activation differences in medial frontal and inferior parietal cortices. Primary perceptual gating or attentional selection processes (P1 and N1 ERPs) were not affected. The results show that differences in multisensory integration explain parts of transformations in cognitive processes between childhood and adulthood that have traditionally been attributed to changes in executive functioning, especially when these require the integration of multiple modalities during response selection. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4933-4945, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
许多日常任务都需要执行功能来实现某个目标。通常情况下，这需要整合来自不同感觉模式的信息。与成年人相比，儿童不太可能整合来自不同模式的信息，同时，他们的执行功能也没有完全发育。然而，直到现在，发展年龄相关效应对多感觉整合过程的影响在多成分行为的背景下（即，不同执行子过程的串联）还没有被研究过。这是有问题的，因为多感觉整合的差异实际上可能解释了传统上归因于执行功能变化的大量发展影响。在一项结合脑电图（EEG）记录和源定位分析的系统神经生理学方法中，我们因此研究了这个问题。结果表明，儿童和成人完成多成分行为的差异并不完全取决于执行功能的发展差异。相反，观察到的反应选择过程中的发展差异（由 P3 ERP 反映）在很大程度上取决于整合来自不同模式的时间分离刺激的复杂性。这种效应与内侧额叶和下顶叶皮质的激活差异有关。主要的感知门控或注意选择过程（P1 和 N1 ERP）不受影响。结果表明，多感觉整合的差异解释了传统上归因于执行功能变化的儿童期和成年期认知过程变化的部分原因，特别是当这些变化在反应选择过程中需要多个模式的整合时。《人类大脑图谱》38:4933-4945, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
