Abstract
The abilities to monitor one’s actions and novel information in the environment are crucial for behavioural and cognitive control. This study investigated the development of error and novelty monitoring and their electrophysiological correlates by using a combined flanker with novelty-oddball task in children (7–12 years) and adolescents (14–18 years). Potential moderating influences of prenatal perturbation of steroid hormones on these performance monitoring processes were explored by comparing individuals who were prenatally exposed and who were not prenatally exposed to synthetic glucocorticoids (sGC). Generally, adolescents performed more accurately and faster than children. However, behavioural adaptations to error or novelty, as reflected in post-error or post-novelty slowing, showed different developmental patterns. Whereas post-novelty slowing could be observed in children and adolescents, error-related slowing was absent in children and was marginally significant in adolescents. Furthermore, the amplitude of error-related negativity was larger in adolescents, whereas the amplitude of novelty-related N2 was larger in children. These age differences suggest that processes involving top-down processing of task-relevant information (for instance, error monitoring) mature later than processes implicating bottom-up processing of salient novel stimuli (for instance, novelty monitoring). Prenatal exposure to sGC did not directly affect performance monitoring but initial findings suggest that it might alter brain-behaviour relation, especially for novelty monitoring.
Highlights
Which is a negative deflection measured by electroencephalography (EEG) at the fronto-central electrodes within approximately 100 ms of an e rror[8,9]
The processes of error and novelty monitoring are often studied independently, the occurrence of both types of events are usually unforeseen or unexpected and require rapid cognitive and behavioural adaptation. Both ERN and the post-novelty slowing” (PNS)-associated N2 have been shown to be generated from a similar neural substrate[22,23,24], i.e., the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the mid-cingulate cortex, that are both part of the medial prefrontal cortex
By using a combined flanker with novelty monitoring task[24], as anticipated, we found that adolescents displayed better overall behavioural performance as shown by higher accuracy rate, lower error rate, faster reaction times and lower reaction time variability
Summary
Which is a negative deflection measured by electroencephalography (EEG) at the fronto-central electrodes within approximately 100 ms of an e rror[8,9]. Ample evidence suggests that activities in ACC or aMCC increase when conflicting, undesired, or unanticipated events are detected during information processing, which signal the need for increased cognitive control in these situations[6,21] While both ERN and N2 may share a similar neural generator, it should be acknowledged that each component is sensitive to different aspects of performance monitoring; whereas the PES-associated ERN reflects the processing of task-relevant information (i.e., one’s own action error), the PNS-associated N2 reflects the processing of task-irrelevant information (i.e., non-relevant external stimuli). Given the critical role of the ACC in cognitive control and performance
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