Cognitive control across adolescence: Dynamic adjustments and mind-wandering.

Abstract

Models of cognitive development suggest that cognitive control, a complex construct that ensures goal-directedness even in the face of distractions, is still maturing across adolescence. In the present study, we investigated how the ability to dynamically adjust cognitive control develops in this period of life, as indexed by the magnitude of the congruency sequence effect (CSE) in conflict tasks, and how this ability might relate to lapses of attention (mindwandering, MW). To these ends, participants from four age groups (12-13, 14-15, 18-20 and 25-27 year-olds) completed confound-minimized variants of the flanker and Simon tasks, along with a Go/No Go task with thought probes to assess their frequency of mindwandering. The CSE was present in both tasks, but was not affected by age in either of them. In addition, the size of the CSE in the flanker, but not in the Simon task was negatively associated with the frequency of MW with awareness. Trait MW and the probability of reporting MW during the task was found to increase with age in accordance with cognitive resource views of MW. Our findings suggest that at the behavioural level there are no substantial developmental changes through the adolescent period in control adjustment ability as measured by the CSE. Response inhibition performance in the Go/No Go task, however, improved significantly with age. The implications of the present results for the conflict monitoring account of the CSE and extant theories of MW are discussed.

Registered Replication Report of Weissman, D. H., Jiang, J., & Egner, T. (2014). Determinants of congruency sequence effects without learning and memory confounds

“…Note: ✓ = support for the presence of the congruency sequence effect (CSE); × = support against the presence of the CSE; -= inconclusive findings. (Aschenbrenner & Balota, 2017), or the correlation between the size of the effect in different tasks across subjects (Gyurkovics et al, 2020;Whitehead, Brewer, & Blais, 2019). Our results neither support, nor contradict these findings.…”

“…This is because even when considered only numerically, the Simon and the prime-probe tasks do not show larger effects than the Stroop and the flanker tasks. It is, however, worth noting that Gyurkovics, Stafford, & Levita (2020) found the CSE to be smaller in a confoundminimized flanker task compared to a confound-minimized Simon task in a sample of adolescents and young adults. This is in line with the findings of the original Weissman et al study and the non-significant pattern observed in the present study.…”

Dynamic Adjustments of Midfrontal Control Signals in Adults and Adolescents

“…Group-level target sample sizes were set to match those in Gyurkovics et al (2019), i.e., approximately 30. This still reflects an increase in statistical power for the conflict task analyses compared to that study, as the number of observations in the task was more than doubled (160 vs. 72 trials by condition).…”

“…Yet developmental studies of the CSE are scarce, and thus far they have typically found no significant differences in the magnitude of the effect between adolescents and adults (Waxer and Morton 2011;Larson, Clawson, et al 2012;Cragg 2016;Smulders et al 2018;Gyurkovics et al 2019). These studies mostly focused on overt behaviour, and, with the exception of Cragg (2016) and Gyurkovics et al (2019), used tasks that contained feature repetitions and stimulusresponse contingencies limiting the scope of conclusions regarding top-down control that can be drawn from these findings (for a discussion of the effect of these confounds on the CSE, see e.g., (Duthoo et al 2014)).…”

“…Yet developmental studies of the CSE are scarce, and thus far they have typically found no significant differences in the magnitude of the effect between adolescents and adults (Waxer and Morton 2011;Larson, Clawson, et al 2012;Cragg 2016;Smulders et al 2018;Gyurkovics et al 2019). These studies mostly focused on overt behaviour, and, with the exception of Cragg (2016) and Gyurkovics et al (2019), used tasks that contained feature repetitions and stimulusresponse contingencies limiting the scope of conclusions regarding top-down control that can be drawn from these findings (for a discussion of the effect of these confounds on the CSE, see e.g., (Duthoo et al 2014)). To further our understanding of adolescent cognitive control, in the present study we used a confound-minimized task that has been optimized to isolate the controlrelated aspects of the CSE to investigate and contrast the neural mechanisms underpinning dynamic control adjustments in adolescents and adults, as measured by EEG.…”