Developmental fractionation of working memory and response inhibition during childhood.

Full Abstract

The lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) plays a major role in both working memory (WM) and response inhibition (RI), which are fundamental for various cognitive abilities. We explored the relationship between these LPFC functions during childhood development by examining the performance of two groups of children in visuospatial and auditory WM tasks and a go/no-go RI task. In the younger children (59 5- and 6-year-olds), performance on the visuospatial WM task correlated significantly with that in the auditory WM task. Furthermore, accuracy in these tasks correlated significantly with performance on the RI task, particularly in the no-go trials. In contrast, there were no significant correlations among those tasks in older children (92 8- and 9-year-olds). These results suggest that functional neural systems for visuospatial WM, auditory WM, and RI, especially those in the LPFC, become fractionated during childhood, thereby enabling more efficient processing of these critical cognitive functions.

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Author information

Author/s: Tsujimoto, Satoshi (S); Kuwajima, Mariko (M); Sawaguchi, Toshiyuki (T);

Affiliation: Laboratory of Cognitive Neurobiology, Hokkaido Univ. Graduate School of Medicine, Sapporo, Japan. tsujimotos(-atsign-)mail.nih.gov

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Experimental psychology (Exp Psychol), published in Germany. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2007-; vol 54 (issue 1) : pp 30-7

Dates: Created 2007/03/07; Completed 2007/05/03;

PMID: 17341012, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Age Factors
Attention - physiology
Child
Child Development - physiology
Child, Preschool
Decision Making - physiology
Female
Humans
Inhibition (Psychology)

Male
Memory, Short-Term - physiology
Orientation - physiology
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Phonetics
Prefrontal Cortex - physiology
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Reaction Time - physiology
Speech Perception - physiology

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