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.

Attentional resource allocation among individuals with different fluid intelligence: The integrated control hypothesis and its evidence from pupillometry.

To clarify the effects of individual differences in fluid intelligence (Gf) on attentional resource allocation, the present study proposes a new hypothesis (i.e., the integrated control hypothesis) based on previous studies and provides preliminary empirical evidence through a pupillometry study. The results showed that both task type and task difficulty play crucial roles in the relationship between Gf and attentional resource allocation when participants perform visuospatial-domain tasks. In particular, in the exploitation task, higher Gf individuals allocated fewer attentional resources than those with average Gf at all the difficulty levels. In contrast, in the exploration task, those with higher intelligence allocated equivalent resources in the low- and medium-difficulty trials and more resources in the high-difficulty trials; this phenomenon was more significant among the male subjects. In conclusion, this study suggests that high Gf individuals tend to control their attention state in tasks with diverse demands, allowing them to dynamically optimize the use of attentional resources and flexibly adapt to changing conditions.

High fluid intelligence is characterized by flexible allocation of attentional resources: Evidence from EEG.

Recently, the integrated control hypothesis (Lu et al., 2020) was proposed to explain the relationship between fluid intelligence (Gf) and attentional resource allocation. This hypothesis suggested that individuals with higher Gf tend to flexibly and adaptively allocate their limited resources according to the task type and task difficulty rather than simply exert more or fewer resources in any condition. To examine this hypothesis, the present study used electroencephalogram (EEG) indicators (i.e., frontal theta-ERS and parietal-occipital alpha-ERD) as the measurements of participants' resource allocation during the exploration task and exploitation task with different difficulties. The results found that higher Gf individuals tend to allocate fewer resources in all difficulty levels in the exploitation task compared to average Gf participants. In contrast, in the exploration task, higher Gf participants would allocate more resources in the medium- and high-difficulty levels than average Gf participants, but this phenomenon was only found in males. These findings provided supportive evidence for the integrated control hypothesis that flexible and adaptive attentional control ability are important characteristics of human intelligence.

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.

The Relationships of Parental Responsiveness, Teaching Responsiveness, and Creativity: The Mediating Role of Creative Self-Efficacy.

This study investigated the relationships between parental responsiveness, teaching responsiveness, and creativity, as well as the mechanism underlying these associations. We collected data from 584 Chinese college students via convenience sampling method and used self-report scales to measure their perceived parental responsiveness, teaching responsiveness, creative self-efficacy, and creativity. We employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the relationships among these variables and the mediation effect. The results revealed that both parental responsiveness and teaching responsiveness were positively related to student creativity. Moreover, creative self-efficacy mediated the relationships of parental responsiveness, teaching responsiveness, and creativity. The findings highlight the significance of responsiveness from parents and teachers on student creativity and verify the potential mediating role of creative self-efficacy. These findings suggest that teachers and parents can foster creativity by providing warm and supportive responses to students' creative needs.

A gifted SNARC? Directional spatial-numerical associations in gifted children with high-level math skills do not differ from controls.

The SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect (i.e., a tendency to associate small/large magnitude numbers with the left/right hand side) is prevalent across the whole lifespan. Because the ability to relate numbers to space has been viewed as a cornerstone in the development of mathematical skills, the relationship between the SNARC effect and math skills has been frequently examined. The results remain largely inconsistent. Studies testing groups of people with very low or very high skill levels in math sometimes found relationships between SNARC and math skills. So far, however, studies testing such extreme math skills level groups were mostly investigating the SNARC effect in individuals revealing math difficulties. Groups with above average math skills remain understudied, especially in regard to children. Here, we investigate the SNARC effect in gifted children, as compared to normally developing children (overall n = 165). Frequentist and Bayesian analysis suggested that the groups did not differ from each other in the SNARC effect. These results are the first to provide evidence for the SNARC effect in a relatively large sample of gifted (and mathematically highly skilled) children. In sum, our study provides another piece of evidence for no direct link between the SNARC effect and mathematical ability in childhood.

Tonic pupil size and its variability are associated with fluid intelligence in adolescents aged 11-14 years.

Tonic pupil size and its variability are sensitive to cognitive abilities (such as fluid intelligence [Gf]) among individuals. The present study aimed to examine this relationship in a new sample set (i.e., adolescents aged 11-14 years) with several important factors considered. We conducted two task-free tasks (the blank-screen viewing task and the scene viewing task) to measure tonic pupil size and its variability in 11-14-year-old adolescents with different Gf levels and preliminarily tested the role of task type and stimuli's luminance on this relationship. The results found that high-Gf adolescents showed smaller tonic pupil size in both tasks but showed larger variability of tonic pupil size in the blank-screen viewing task. Task type and stimuli's luminance could influence tonic pupil size and its variability in different ways. Cognitive and underlying neural mechanisms of these results are discussed to provide an explanation and suggestions for future studies.

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.

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.

The Roles of Fluid Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence in Affective Decision-Making During the Transition to Early Adolescence.

The current study mainly explored the influence of fluid intelligence (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EI) on affective decision-making from a developmental perspective, specifically, during the transition from childhood into early adolescence. Meanwhile, their age-related differences in affective decision-making were explored. A total of 198 participants aged 8-12 completed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), the Cattell's Culture Fair Intelligence Test and the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Child Form. Based on the net scores of IGT, the development of affective decision-making ability did not increase monotonically with age, and there was a developmental trend of an impaired IGT performance in early adolescence (aged 11-12), especially in the early learning phase (first 40 trials) of the IGT. More importantly, IQ and EI played different roles for children and early adolescents: IQ and EI jointly predicted the IGT performance for 8-10 years old children, whereas only EI contributed to the IGT performance of 11-12 years old early adolescents. The present study extends the evidence how cognitive processing and emotional processing interact in affective decision-making from the developmental perspective. Furthermore, it provides insights of future research and intervention with early adolescents' poor affective decision-making.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

Latent Factors in Attention Emerge from 9 Years of Age among Elementary School Children.

We explored the development of attention among elementary school children. Three hundred and sixty-five primary school children aged 7-12 years completed seven attention tests (alertness, focused attention, divided attention, attentional switching, sustained attention, spatial attention, and supervisory attention). A factor analysis indicated that there was no stable construct of attention among 7- to 8-year-old children. However, from 9 years on, children's attention could be separated into perceptual and executive attention. Notably, however, the attention types included in these two factors differed from those among adults.

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.