Selective Inhibitory Control in Middle Childhood

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to investigate the development of selective inhibitory control in middle childhood, a critical period for the maturation of inhibition-related processes. To this end, 64 children aged 6–7 and 56 children aged 10–11 performed a stimulus-selective stop-signal task, which allowed us to estimate not only the efficiency of response inhibition (the stop-signal reaction time or SSRT), but also the strategy adopted by participants to achieve task demands. We found that the adoption of a non-selective (global) strategy characterized by stopping indiscriminately to all stimuli decreased in older children, so that most of them were able to interrupt their ongoing responses selectively at the end of middle childhood. Moreover, compared to younger children, older children were more efficient in their ability to cancel an initiated response (indexed by a shorter SSRT), regardless of which strategy they used. Additionally, we found improvements in other forms of impulsivity, such as the control of premature responding (waiting impulsivity), and attentional-related processes, such as intra-individual variability and distractibility. The present results suggest that middle childhood represents a milestone in the development of crucial aspects of inhibitory control, including selective stopping.

The development of selective stopping: Qualitative and quantitative changes from childhood to early adulthood

“…Specifically, we found an increase in the use of the independent selective stopping strategy ( iDtS) and a decrease in the use of the global, non‐selective stopping strategy ( StD ) in preadolescents relative to younger children, with no differences between preadolescents and young adults. These findings suggest that preadolescence may be the endpoint of the maturation of processes needed to achieve task requirements underlying stopping selectively, in line with previous studies (Rincón‐Pérez et al., 2021).…”

“…(2021) found that for short SSDs, participants categorized as StD and dDtS showed failed stop RTs longer than go RTs (thus violating the independence assumption), but when SSDs were long both strategies showed failed stop RTs shorter than go RTs (the independence assumption was met). These results question prior procedures for categorizing subjects by individual differences in strategies (e.g., Bissett & Logan, 2014; Rincón‐Pérez et al., 2021; Sánchez‐Carmona et al., 2016; Sebastian et al., 2017), which assume that there are violations of independence at all SSDs in dDtS , and no violations of context independence in StD at any SSDs. In this light, differences in strategies might be an artefact of different individuals sampling different SSD distributions.…”

“…Thus, we expected to find a greater use of selective stopping strategies in young adults and preadolescents in comparison to children. The non‐selective (global) stopping strategy seems to be rarely adopted already by children aged 10–11 years in favor of selective stopping strategies (Rincón‐Pérez et al., 2021), so we did not expect to find notable differences in strategy use in later developmental periods. Moreover, we investigated whether the developmental trajectories of SSRT are similar between the different stopping strategies.…”

“…Gender distribution did not differ between groups (chi‐squared test; χ 2 = 1.54, df = 2, p = 0.46). Data from a subset of participants in this sample were included in two previous studies (Rincón‐Pérez et al., 2020; Rincón‐Pérez et al., 2021).…”

“…Thus, task‐related factors such as signal discrimination difficulty and probability of occurrence of the signals, and individual‐related factors such as genetic variations in the dopaminergic system, have been shown to influence strategy adoption in adults (Bissett & Logan, 2014; Rincón‐Pérez et al., 2020; Sánchez‐Carmona et al., 2021; Verbruggen & Logan, 2015). To our knowledge, only two preliminary studies have examined age‐related differences in the adoption of stopping strategies during a selective stopping task (Hsieh & Lin, 2017; Rincón‐Pérez et al., 2021). Whereas the former observed a similar pattern of strategy use between younger adults (20–30 years) and older adults (61–76 years), the latter found important changes in strategy adoption in middle childhood.…”