Immature Frontal Lobe Contributions to Cognitive Control in Children

“…and John D.E. Gabrieli1,2 1Neurosciences Program Stanford University Stanford, California 94305 Prefrontal lesions in adults and nonhuman primates lead 2 Department of Psychology to impairments in cognitive control (Luria, 1966; Stuss Stanford University and Benson, 1986; Miller and Cohen, 2001).”

“This task combined the Eriksen flanker (Erik- sen and Eriksen, 1974) and go/no-go paradigms (Figure Introduction 1).”

“…University maturation is provided by measures of myelination (YaWashington, D.C. 20057 kovlev and Lecours, 1967; Pfefferbaum et al., 1993; Giedd et al., 1999), gray matter reduction (Jernigan et al., 1991; Pfefferbaum et al., 1993; Sowell et al., 2001), Summary synaptogenesis…”

“The large differences in the present a button box with the index and middle fingers of their right hand.crosssectional study suggests that a major transformaPsyscope (Cohen et al., 1993) was used to generate stimuli and tion occurs between ages 12 and 19, and imaging stud- to collect responses.”

“…1993; Giedd et al., 1999), gray matter reduction (Jernigan et al., 1991; Pfefferbaum et al., 1993; Sowell et al., 2001), Summary synaptogenesis (Huttenlocher, 1979), and resting metabolism (Chugani et al., 1987; for reviews, see Casey Event-related fMRI was employed to characterize dif- et…”

“Bilingual children outperform monolingual children on tasks of inhibitory control of attention, one key aspect of executive function (Bialystok 1999, 2001; Bunge et al. 2002; Zelazo et al. 2003).”

“Incongruency in a flanker task activates the IFG/AI and underlying striatum area, and although the direction of the relationship is inconsistent over studies, activity in this area was in some studies correlated with the flanker incongruency effect on reaction times (Bunge et al., 2002; Wager et al., 2005); a relation…”

“Numerous studies have shown that response inhibition increases from childhood through young adulthood (Bunge et al., 2002; Luna et al., 2004; Marsh et al., 2006; Rubia et al., 2006; Velanova et al., 2008; Williams et al., 1999).”

“, who demonstrated that children who perform better than others recruit left prefrontal cortex more extensively and suggested that this could be related to use of a verbal strategy during performance in this task (36).”

“…and Gaillard, 2003; Schlaggar et al., 2002; Thomas et al., 1999; Turkeltaub et al., 2003), but attention to the methodological issues needs to focus future investigations using this technique (Casey, 2002; Gaillard et al., 2001; Poldrack et al., 2002; Stiles et al., 2003; Wenger et al., 2004).”

“The fact that children exhibit more widespread connectivity in the VFC region may explain why they are behaviorally more susceptible to interruption by environmental stimuli and less able to maintain activities requiring top-down attentional control (Bunge et al., 2002).”

“…ability is associated with functional development of pFC, for example, DLPFC is recruited more by adults than children during working memory and cognitive control tasks (Thomason et al., 2009; Bunge & Wright, 2007; Crone, Wendelken, Donohue, van Leijenhorst, & Bunge, 2006; Bunge et al., 2002).”

“Age has been shown to have a significant influence not only on Stop-signal performance, but also on neural activation during response inhibition (Bunge et al., 2002; Rubia et al., 2006).”

“This has usually been attributed to worse attentional focusing or worse inhibition function in children than in adults (Gerstadt et al., 1994; Bunge et al., 2002; Szűcs et al., 2007, 2009; Bryce et al., 2011).”

“It was predicted that with growth in cognitive skills during the developmental period (e.g., Bunge et al., 2002; Durston et al., 2002; Williams et al., 1999), there would be an increase in the sophistication of participants’ lies (Hypothesis 3; Carlson & Moses, 2001; Evans et al., 2011; Talwar &…”

“Since these regions have been shown to be related to attentional control (Bunge, Dudukovic, Thomason, Vaidya, & Gabrieli, 2002; Milham, Banich & Barad, 2003), Coderre and colleagues suggested that the functional overlap reflects the interdependence between language use and domain-general executive…”

“…of the brain during tasks of visual spatial working memory (Klingberg et al., 2002; Kwon et al., 2002; Thomas et al., 1999), another study showed a developmental shift in the location of active voxels during performance (Scherf, Sweeney, & Luna, 2006; similar to the findings of Bunge et al., 2002).”

“It is important to note though in this study we found the right inferior frontal gyrus to be activated above threshold during response-related activity for both tasks and this is consistent with both tasks involving variations of response inhibition (Bunge et al., 2002a; Konishi et al., 1999).”

“Second, both increases and decreases in brain activity between age groups are often observed from performance of the same task [Bunge et al., 2002; Konrad et al., 2005; Velanova et al., 2009].”

“…of enhanced activation in these posterior regions in children compared to adults during more complex cognitive inhibitory (Booth et al., 2003; Bunge et al., 2002; Casey et al., 1997; Durston et al., 2002; Rubia et al., 2000, 2006, 2007a), switching (Christakou et al., 2009; Rubia et al.,…”

“Other developmental studies have also shown regions of greater activity in adults (Bunge et al. 2002; Turkeltaub et al. 2003).”

“Frye, & Rapus, 1996), resist interference ( Bunge , Dudukovic, Thomason, Vaidya, & Gabrieli, 2001; Ridderinkhof & Van der Molen, 1995), and keep relevant information in mind (Crone, Ridderinkhof, Somsen, Worm, & Van der Molen, in press) improves with age.”

“Overall, developmental fMRI studies indicate a protracted development of various brain regions supporting inhibitory control into adolescence (Bunge et al., 2002; Casey et al., 1997; Durston et al., 2006; Luna et al., 2001; Marsh et al., 2006; Rubia et al., 2000, 2006, 2007; Tamm et al., 2002;…”

“Furthermore, the PFC is one of the last cortical regions to reach full structural maturation (Sowell et al., 1999; Yakovlev and Lecours, 1967) and it has been suggested that immaturity in cognitive control may be associated with an inability to recruit PFC regions (Bunge et al., 2002).”

“One group of investigators (Bunge et al., 2002) used a Go/No-go task during fMRI and examined the correlation of commission errors with No-go associated activation, finding that better performance (fewer commission errors) correlated with activation in several areas, including premotor, parietal,…”

“…NeuroImage (2010), doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.11.021 parietal cortex (Castellanos et al., 2002; McAlonan et al., 2005), striatum (Castellanos et al., 2002; Langen et al., 2009; Qiu et al., 2009), and cerebellum (Carper and Courchesne, 2000; Castellanos et al., 2002; Mostofsky et al., 1998).”

“…response inhibition in Go/No-go tasks, adults show enhanced activation in lateral and medial frontal and parietal regions relative to children (Bunge et al., 2002), and there is furthermore evidence for linear progressive enhancement of functional activation with age in lateral and medial…”

“Over the past decade, several studies have examined developmental changes in the recruitment of brain areas belonging to these networks using cognitive tasks ranging from response inhibition, attention, and memory, to decision-making, reasoning and problem solving [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27].”

“Structurally [Sowell et al., 1999, 2004] and functionally during inhibition tasks (Adleman et al., 2002; Bunge et al., 2002; Rubia et al., 2000; Rubia et al., 2007b; Rubia et al., 2006, Rubia et al., 2013) [for review see (Rubia, 2013)], these lateral prefrontal, striatal and parietal brain regions…”

“Activation of the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and MTG has been detected during nogo trials with fMRI (Liddle et al., 2001; Garavan et al., 2002; Bunge et al., 2002; Maguire et al., 2003; Kelly et al., 2004) and source modeling using EEG (Kiefer et al., 1998).”

“These include the gating of non-target information (interference suppression) (Bunge et al., 2002), the general cognitive load associated with switching between tasks (mixing cost) (Rubin and Meiran, 2005), and the use of information that assists in goal directed activity (facilitation) (Hedden and…”

“A possible explanation for this comes from previous functional studies that have found age-related lateralization of the DLPFC during development [Bunge et al., 2002; Rubia et al., 2006].”

“It also is thought to act as a repository of learned stimulus–response associations (Bunge et al., 2002, 2003) from which the DLPFC ‘‘selects’’ the appropriate response.”

“The ROIs were consistent with regions reported in past studies of response inhibition in typical individuals (Casey et al. 2001; Rubia et al. 2001, 2006; Bunge et al. 2002; Durston, Thomas, Yang et al. 2002; Aron and Poldrack 2005; Booth et al. 2005; Vaidya et al. 2005; Kana et al. 2007).”

“…in cognitive control across various tasks, both age-related increases and decreases in PFC activity between childhood and adulthood have been found (Bunge et al., 2002; Booth et al., 2003; Durston et al., 2006; Marsh et al., 2006; Rubia et al., 2007; Velanova et al., 2009; Crone and Dahl, 2012).”

“…markedly in terms of whether they report age-related increases (e.g., Adleman et al., 2002), decreases (Casey et al., 1997; Durston et al., 2006), or qualitative differences (Bunge et al., 2002a) in patterns of prefrontal cortex activity associated with performance in tasks of cognitive control.”

“Reduced frontal lobe contributions are thought to underlie immature control processes in children, who activate posterior but not prefrontal regions during EF tasks (48).”

“(2002), we considered two dimensions of inhibition: response inhibition with low WM demands and interference suppression, which is associated with higher WM demands and requires the individual to address interference or conflict from recently presented information or to filter out incongruent information.”

“Despite the fact that interpretations of the developmental changes in brain activity have been made by referring to structural maturational processes ( Bunge et al., 2002; Casey et al., 2000), it has actually not yet been demonstrated whether the maturational changes occurring at the cellular level really result in th…”

“Bunge et al. observed right inferior frontal and right insula activity in a modified flanker task, in which participants had to respond to a target while disregarding nearby distracting information ( Bunge et al., 2002 ).”

“Also, suppressing attentional interference is associated with greater AINS activity (Bunge et al., 2002), although actual response inhibition does not involve AINS but instead the adjacent ventrolateral PFC.”

“BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE published: 25 July 2014 doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00250 Executive function and bilingualism in young and older adults”

“…is interesting in the context of previous reports that the hemodynamic response during Go/No-Go performance generally increases between adolescence and adulthood in numerous brain regions [Booth et al., 2003; Bunge et al., 2002; Durston et al., 2002; Rubia et al., 2000, 2006; Tamm et al., 2002].”

“Moreover, inhibition is not a single process, and again research with children (Bunge, Dudukovic, Thomason, Vaidya, & Gabrieli, 2002; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008) and adults (Bunge et al., 2002; Luk, Anderson, Craik, Grady, & Bialystok, 2010) has reported different outcomes in both behavior…”

“…as children, who show protracted development of prefrontal cortex (Huttenlocher & Dabholkar, 1997) and correspondingly protracted development of cognitive control (e.g., Bunge et al., 2002), or patients with cognitive control deficits due to constrained LIFG damage (e.g., Hamilton & Martin, 2005).”

“…Crump et al., 2017; Crump et al., 2006; Hübner and Mishra, 2016; King et al., 2012; Weidler and Bugg, 2016), font (Bugg et al., 2008; Crump, 2016), shape (Crump et al., 2008), color (Vietze and Wendt, 2009), social categories (Cañadas et al., 2013) and incidental sematic cues (Blais et al., 2015).”

“…individuals indicate functional changes within frontostriatal circuits that underlie age-related improvements in the capacity for self-regulation (Casey et al., 1997; Rubia et al., 2000b, 2006; Luna et al., 2001; Adleman et al., 2002; Bunge et al., 2002; Tamm et al., 2002; Marsh et al., 2006).”

“…on response inhibition tasks is associated with age-related maturation of brain regions within the frontostriatal circuitry in both cross-sectional (Casey et al. 1997; Luna et al. 2001; Bunge et al. 2002; Durston et al. 2002) and longitudinal (Durston et al. 2006; Casey et al. 2011) samples.”

“Activity in selfcontrol regions also becomes increasingly refined over time (Casey et al., 2000; Bunge et al., 2002; Durston et al., 2006).”

“A uthor M anuscript A uthor M anuscript A uthor M anuscript A uthor M anuscript executive processing (Bunge et al., 2002; Ye & Zhou, 2009), and language control (Costafreda et al., 2006; Montant, Schön, Anton, & Ziegler, 2011).”