The neurodevelopmental changes in cognitive control during childhood and adolescence. Evidence from Event-Related Potential research

Salient maturational changes in cognitive functioning not only characterize the first years of a child's life, but continue to take place through late childhood and adolescence up into early adulthood. One of the most striking changes seen in cognitive functioning in school-aged children and adolescents is the improvement of cognitive control. Children get better and better at engaging in complex behaviours aimed at reaching often long-term goals, thereby overriding the distraction by irrelevant information and the engagement in impulsive reactions. These developmental changes in cognitive control are enabled by structural and functional changes in the child's and adolescent's brain, in particular by developmental changes of the prefrontal cortex. Only recently brain imaging studies have begun to unravel these neural changes and their relationship with cognitive development; however both are still far from fully understood. This doctoral project is aimed at a better understanding of the developmental changes in cognitive control seen during childhood and adolescence and their relation to developmental changes in the underlying brain processes. To this end an extensive battery of cognitive tasks was administered to a large group of normally developing children ranging in age from 6 to 15 years of age. This battery included several tasks typically used to assess different cognitive control functions, such as response control, response inhibition, attentional set shifting, dual task performance, decision making and working memory. The age-related changes evident in task performance will be investigated. Because hormonal changes related to puberty are also known to influence cognitive functioning during the age period under study, a puberty rating scale was administered to the entire group of children. This will allow us to disentangle developmental changes in cognitive control related to age from changes related to puberty stage. The inclusion of several tasks that are standard for the assessment of cognitive control will provide insight into the differential developmental trajectories followed by the different cognitive control functions. Based on a review of the imaging literature on the neural processing involved during performance of such commonly used cognitive control tasks, a model of the prefrontal cortex could be established. This model indicated both commonly and task-specific activated regions and enabled us to relate the patterns of development se