Abstract
Monitoring progression towards one's goals is essential for efficient cognitive control. Immature performance monitoring may contribute to suboptimal cognitive control engagement in childhood, potentially explaining why children engage control reactively even when proactive control would be more effective. This study investigated whether encouraging children to actively monitor their performance results in more mature control engagement. Electroencephalography data were collected while children and adults performed a flanker task in three conditions in which they were provided no feedback, standard feedback, or were asked to estimate their own feedback. Both age groups accurately estimated their own feedback. Critically, feedback estimation promoted online performance monitoring and proactive engagement of attention and inhibition during the flanker period in children. These findings indicate that proactive control engagement in childhood can be effectively supported by encouraging performance monitoring.
Highlights
To reach a goal, be it a score in a test or a time in a race, it is important to identify whether current performance is on track
Several event‐related potentials (ERPs) differentiate correct from erroneous responses during or immediately after a response, including the cor‐ rect‐response positivity (CRP), a positive deflection enhanced during the production of a correct response, and the error‐related negativ‐ ity (ERN), a negative deflection enhanced following the production of an error (Davies, Segalowitz, & Gavin, 2004)
When monitoring was encour‐ aged through feedback estimation, children showed neural evidence of greater performance monitoring as well as increased proactive control
Summary
Be it a score in a test or a time in a race, it is important to identify whether current performance is on track. This study tested whether children engage control more proactively when encouraged to monitor performance. Children’s performance was compared to that of adults who are effi‐ cient proactive control users and less likely to vary proactive con‐ trol engagement as a function of performance monitoring incentive. Increasing performance monitoring across the no‐feedback, standard‐feedback, and feedback–estimation con‐ ditions should be evidenced in children by increasing CRP across conditions This should not occur in adults, who should actively monitor performance regardless of condition. If increas‐ ing performance monitoring leads to greater proactive control engagement, flanker‐locked P1 and N2 should increase with the incentive to monitor performance across conditions in children, but not in adults who should engage proactive control in all conditions
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