Impact of a combined cognitive and response inhibition training in school-age children

Abstract

The aims of this work were: (1) to implement a brief 6 sessions intervention, which combines training activities of Cognitive Inhibition (CI) and Response Inhibition (RI), in a group of schoolchildren aged from 6 to 8 years (M = 6.8, SD = .61; n = 38; 60.5% girls, 39.5% boys); (2) to analyze the effects of the intervention on training tasks performances, on untraining inhibitory tasks (near transfer) and on performance in a FI task (far transfer); and (3) to study individual differences in training effects associated with baseline inhibitory performance. An experimental design, pre-test, post-test and control group (CG), was implemented. The main results indicate an improvement in performance in trained tasks -differences between first and last session: CI training Z = -3.455, p = .001; RI training Z = -3.758, p < .001-, low effects of the intervention on performance in an untrained CI task -experimental group (EG), difference pre/post-test performance: F(1,16) = 3.893, p = .066, np2 = .196- and effects on performance in the FI task -F(1,36) = 6.484, p = .015, np2 = .153. In the first two cases, it was observed that the students with a lower base line inhibitory performance, showed greater profits -CI training, r = -.524, p = .031; RI training, r = -.470, p = .057; untrained CI task, r = .755, p = .001. We discussed the transfer based processing on short interventions and the use of different tasks measurements