Pediatric Neuroscience Laboratory, Psychology Clinical Neuroscience Center, Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA.
MGH/MIT Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Exp Brain Res. 2021 Nov;239(11):3221-3242. doi: 10.1007/s00221-021-06191-9. Epub 2021 Aug 27.
Inhibitory control, the ability to suppress irrelevant thoughts or actions, is central to cognitive and social development. Protracted maturation of frontal brain networks has been reported as a major restraint for this ability, yet, young children, when motivated, successfully inhibit delayed responses. A better understanding of the age-dependent neural inhibitory mechanism operating during the awaiting-to-respond window in children may elucidate this conundrum. We recorded ERPs from children and parental adults to a visual-spatial working memory task with delayed responses. Cortical activation elicited during the first 1000 ms of the awaiting-to-respond window showed, as predicted by prior studies, early inhibitory effects in prefrontal ERPs (P200, 160-260 ms) associated with top-down attentional-biasing, and later effects in parietal/occipital ERPs (P300, 270-650 ms) associated with selective inhibition of task-irrelevant stimuli/responses and recurrent memory retrieval. Children successfully inhibited delayed responses and performed with a high level of accuracy (often over 90%), although, the prefrontal P200 displayed reduced amplitude and uniformly delayed peak latency, suggesting low efficacy of top-down attentional-biasing. P300, however, with no significant age-contrasts in latency was markedly elevated in children over the occipital/inferior parietal regions, with effects stronger in younger children. These results provide developmental evidence supporting the sensorimotor recruitment model of visual-spatial working memory relying on the occipital/parietal regions of the early maturing dorsal-visual network. The evidence is in line with the concept of age-dependent variability in the recruitment of cognitive inhibitory networks, complementing the former predominant focus on frontal lobes.
抑制控制，即抑制无关思维或行为的能力，是认知和社会发展的核心。据报道，额叶大脑网络的长期成熟是限制这种能力的主要因素，但当受到激励时，年幼的孩子能够成功地抑制延迟反应。更好地理解在儿童等待反应窗口期间运作的与年龄相关的神经抑制机制，可能有助于解决这一难题。我们记录了儿童和成年父母在视觉空间工作记忆任务中延迟反应的 ERP。正如先前研究预测的那样，在等待反应窗口的前 1000 毫秒内，皮层激活显示出前额叶 ERP 中的早期抑制效应（P200，160-260 毫秒），与自上而下的注意偏向有关，以及随后的顶叶/枕叶 ERP 中的效应（P300，270-650 毫秒），与对任务无关的刺激/反应的选择性抑制和反复记忆检索有关。儿童成功地抑制了延迟反应，并表现出很高的准确性（通常超过 90%），尽管前额叶 P200 的振幅降低且峰值潜伏期均匀延迟，表明自上而下的注意偏向效果不佳。然而，P300 的潜伏期没有显著的年龄差异，但在儿童中明显高于枕叶/下顶叶区域，且在年幼的儿童中效应更强。这些结果提供了支持依赖早期成熟的背侧视觉网络的枕叶/顶叶区域的视觉空间工作记忆的感觉运动募集模型的发展证据。这一证据与认知抑制网络募集的年龄依赖性可变性的概念一致，补充了以前对额叶的主要关注。
