Children’s inhibition skills are associated with their P3a latency—results from an exploratory study

Abstract

Background The P3a response is thought to reflect involuntary orienting to an unexpected stimulus and has been connected with set-shifting and inhibition in some studies. In our exploratory study, we investigated if the amplitude and the latency of the P3a response were associated with the performance in a modified flanker task measuring inhibition and set-shifting in 10-year-old children (N = 42). Children participated in electroencephalography (EEG) measurement with an auditory multifeature paradigm including standard, deviating, and novel sounds. In addition, they performed a separate flanker task requiring inhibition and set-shifting skills. Results The P3a latencies for deviant sounds were associated with the reaction time reflecting inhibition: the shorter the response latencies were, the faster the reaction time was. The P3a latencies for novel sounds were not linked to the reaction times reflecting either inhibition or set-shifting. In addition, the magnitude of the P3a response was not associated with the performance in the flanker task. Conclusions Our results suggest that P3a response latency and reaction speed reflecting inhibitory skills are based on shared neural mechanism. Thus, the present study brings new insight to the field investigating the associations between behavior and its neural indices.

Music‐based interventions in community settings: Navigating the tension between rigor and ecological validity

“…Interestingly, even if the mismatch negativity (MMN) evoked by acoustic changes in speech stimuli was associated with the performance in the phonemic awareness test in the follow‐up, the MMN was not modulated by the music or dance activities. 24 Notably, it turned out that a subsection of the children had started the music or dance lessons before the follow‐up, dropped out of the groups during the follow‐up, or participated in such activities outside the daycare despite their original group status. Thus, the final analyses used the number of months in either activity as the predictor instead of the original group divisions.…”

“…No such group difference was observed for digit span forward scores (one‐way ANCOVA, F (2, 106) = 0.583, p = 0.560). 24 This implies that music lessons selectively improved the central executive system of auditory working memory when compared with language lessons or no lessons. In other working memory functions in auditory or visual modalities, there were no effects of the lessons.…”

Frontal P300 asymmetry and congruence judgment: Retroactive switching is impaired during school day mornings in female adolescents

“…While many studies quantify the effect of SST and time-of-day using standardized measures such as testing scores or the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) with good success, there is also a breadth of research that provides context to the target behaviors with neural correlates of cognition. For example, frontal N2 and frontal P300 effects are reliable ERP markers of inhibitory control in children ( Linnavalli et al, 2022 , Pietto et al, 2018 ), and intervention can beneficially influence this marker ( Pietto et al, 2018 ). Furthermore, frontal asymmetry (an uneven hemispheric activation) has been shown to correlate with numerous cognitive domains involving effortful control including attention ( Longarzo et al, 2020 ), mental imagery ( D'Angiulli et al, 2021 ), decision making ( Neal and Gable, 2019 ), and auditory executive functions ( Byczynski et al, 2022 ).…”