Response Inhibition and Interference Suppression in Individuals With Down Syndrome Compared to Typically Developing Children.

Martina Fontana,Laura Traverso,Maria C Passolunghi,Maria Carmen Usai

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00660

Martina Fontana, Laura Traverso + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00660

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Abstract

The present study aims to investigate inhibition in individuals with Down Syndrome compared to typically developing children with different inhibitory tasks tapping response inhibition and interference suppression. Previous studies that aimed to investigate inhibition in individuals with Down Syndrome reported contradictory results that are difficult to compare given the different types of inhibitory tasks used and the lack of reference to a theoretical model of inhibition that was tested in children (see Bunge et al., 2002; Gandolfi et al., 2014). Three groups took part in the study: 32 individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) with a mean age of 14 years and 4 months, 35 typically developing children 5 years of age (5TD), and 30 typically developing children 6 years of age (6TD). No difference emerged among the groups in fluid intelligence. Based on a confirmatory factor analysis, two different inhibition factors were identified (response inhibition and interference suppression), and two composite scores were calculated. An ANOVA was then executed with the composite inhibitory scores as dependent variables and group membership as the between-subject variable to explore the group differences in inhibition components. The 6TD group outperformed the 5TD group in both response inhibition and interference suppression component scores. No differences were found in both inhibition components between the DS group and 5TD. In contrast, the 6TD group outperformed the DS group in both response inhibition and in the interference suppression component's scores. Summarizing, our findings show that both response inhibition and interference suppression significantly increased during school transition and that individuals with DS showed a delay in both response inhibition and interference suppression components compared to typically developing 6-year-olds, but their performance was similar to typically developing 5-year-olds.

Highlights

Down Syndrome (DS) is the most common genetic syndrome associated with intellectual disability and affects ∼1 in 700 newborns (Sherman et al, 2007; Mégarbané et al, 2009)
Inhibition: No significant difference between DS group and MA control group in stopping task
To the best of our knowledge, in the last 20 years, only ten studies have examined the inhibition abilities of individuals with DS. These studies reported contradictory results and generally used only response inhibition tasks without referring to a theoretical model of inhibition. This is the first study in which different inhibition tasks were used to investigate two inhibition components with reference to a model of inhibition tested in children (Gandolfi et al, 2014)

Summary

Introduction

Down Syndrome (DS) is the most common genetic syndrome associated with intellectual disability and affects ∼1 in 700 newborns (Sherman et al, 2007; Mégarbané et al, 2009). Individuals with DS are usually characterized by moderate to severe learning disabilities and relative language impairments, with greater expressive difficulties than receptive ones (Fowler et al, 1994; Abbeduto et al, 2001; Laws and Bishop, 2004; Fidler and Nadel, 2007; Næss et al, 2011). People with DS have poorer working memory performance than controls, especially on tasks that require verbal processing compared to tasks with visual and spatial stimuli (Jarrold and Baddeley, 1997; Jarrold et al, 1999). This difference seems to be independent of the acoustic deficits typical of DS (Jarrold et al, 2000)

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