The effects of inhibitory control training for preschoolers on reasoning ability and neural activity.

Qian Liu,Albert Ziegler,Jiannong Shi,Xinyi Zhu

doi:10.1038/srep14200

Abstract

Inhibitory control (including response inhibition and interference control) develops rapidly during the preschool period and is important for early cognitive development. This study aimed to determine the training and transfer effects on response inhibition in young children. Children in the training group (N = 20; 12 boys, mean age 4.87 ± 0.26 years) played “Fruit Ninja” on a tablet computer for 15 min/day, 4 days/week, for 3 weeks. Children in the active control group (N = 20; 10 boys, mean age 4.88 ± 0.20 years) played a coloring game on a tablet computer for 10 min/day, 1–2 days/week, for 3 weeks. Several cognitive tasks (involving inhibitory control, working memory, and fluid intelligence) were used to evaluate the transfer effects, and electroencephalography (EEG) was performed during a go/no-go task. Progress on the trained game was significant, while performance on a reasoning task (Raven’s Progressive Matrices) revealed a trend-level improvement from pre- to post-test. EEG indicated that the N2 effect of the go/no-go task was enhanced after training for girls. This study is the first to show that pure response inhibition training can potentially improve reasoning ability. Furthermore, gender differences in the training-induced changes in neural activity were found in preschoolers.

Highlights

Inhibition develops earlier and plays a more fundamental role in early cognitive development
Considering the importance of inhibitory control and neural plasticity during early childhood[14,17,23,24,25], we focused on inhibitory control training, especially response inhibition training for preschoolers in the present work
Participants in the training group improved their performance on the training task, which demonstrated that the efficiency of response inhibition can be improved with training for preschoolers

Summary

Introduction

Inhibition develops earlier and plays a more fundamental role in early cognitive development. Rueda and colleagues trained children (4- and 6-year-olds, 5 training days in total over 2–3 weeks) using three tasks (including a Stroop-like task); while there were no group differences in the behavioral data except for performance on the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test, the trained children showed “adult-like” brain activity (more efficient and faster activation) in response to the flanker task[28] Subsequent work replicated their results and showed that some (weaker) of the training-induced changes lasted for 2 months[29]. EEG recordings can investigate the actual brain processes employed during task performance, revealing the subtle physiological effects that result from training, possibly before overt effects become apparent Another new direction in cognitive training is to focus on individual differences in predicting training-related transfer effects and brain changes. We hypothesized that response inhibition training would: (1) improve participants’ performance on the training task; (2) promote participants’ performance on the non-trained task, which reflected response inhibition or related cognitive constructs; (3) lead to changes in brain activity, as indicated by the N2 effect; and (4) show gender differences in the gains of behavior and neural activity

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Conclusion