Oscillatory brain mechanisms supporting response cancellation in selective stopping strategies

Selective Inhibitory Control in Middle Childhood

“…Even so, there was a significant increase in its use in older children compared to younger children, so that very few children used the StD strategy by the end of middle childhood. Selective inhibition is more complex than global inhibition due to the participation of additional inhibitory processes (both reactive and proactive) and also due to the greater involvement of other cognitive processes such as working memory and perceptual and attentional discrimination [ 16 , 17 , 19 , 41 ]. This greater complexity is also evidenced by the recruitment of additional brain areas, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the insula or the striatum [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 54 ], which suggests that the level of brain maturation required for proper selective inhibitory control is presumably achieved slightly later than for global inhibition.…”

“…Participants completed a stimulus-selective stop-signal task adapted for children [ 18 , 19 , 24 ], where three different stimuli were presented ( Figure 1 ). The go stimulus was a white down-pointing arrow on a black background, with a duration of 1500 ms.…”

“…In these trials, called the ignore trials, children were told to press the spacebar even if they saw the green square and finish their response as if nothing had happened and it was a regular go trial. Bright colours were used because salient stop signals such as these reduce the influence of perceptual discrimination processes on the SSRT, and therefore, the probability that group differences may be attributed to them is also reduced [ 19 , 41 , 48 ]. Furthermore, salient signals promote the use of a selective stopping strategy as opposed to a global non-selective strategy [ 41 ].…”

“…In contrast, selective inhibition is a more complex form of inhibitory control that is required in real world situations where either certain responses must be stopped but not others (response-selective stopping) or motor responses must be inhibited to certain stimuli but not others (stimulus-selective stopping) [ 16 , 17 ]. Selective inhibitory control requires the activation of some of the same brain areas needed for global stopping such as the inferior frontal gyrus and the pre-supplementary motor area [ 14 , 17 ], but also needs further activation of other regions including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and striatum [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. This is possibly because of its greater complexity and the greater involvement of processes outside pure inhibition such as perceptive and attentional discrimination or working memory.…”

“…The main aim of this study was to investigate the development of selective inhibitory control in middle childhood using a stimulus-selective stop-signal task, by comparing a group of children at the beginning of middle childhood (aged 6–7) to a group of children at the end of this developmental period (aged 10–11). Given that selective inhibition is more complex and requires the participation of more brain areas than non-selective or global inhibition [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 41 ], we hypothesized that selective stopping strategies (iDtS and dDtS) would be chosen by older children to a greater extent than by younger children. Moreover, we expected to find a greater efficiency of the stopping process (indicated by shorter SSRTs) in older children compared to younger children, even after taking into account the different strategies that participants adopt to solve the task.…”