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Background Social anxiety symptoms are most likely to emerge during adolescence, a developmental window marked by heightened concern over peer evaluation. However, the neurocognitive mechanism(s) underlying adolescent social anxiety remain unclear. Emerging work points to the error-related negativity (ERN) as a potential neural marker of exaggerated self/error-monitoring in social anxiety, particularly for errors committed in front of peers. However, social anxiety symptoms are marked by heterogeneity and it remains unclear exactly what domain(s) of social anxiety symptoms are associated with ERN variation in peer presence, particularly within the adolescent period. Methods To advance and deepen the mechanistic understanding of the ERN's putative role as a neural marker for social anxiety in adolescence, we leveraged a social manipulation procedure and assessed a developmentally salient domain of social anxiety during adolescence – fear of negative evaluation (FNE). Adolescents residing in Hanzhong, a small city in the southwestern region of mainland China, had EEG recorded while performing a flanker task, twice (peer presence/absence); FNE, as well as global social anxiety symptoms, was assessed. Results Overall ERN increases in peer presence. FNE specifically, but not global levels of social anxiety symptoms, predicted ERN in peer presence. Conclusions These data are the first demonstration that the ERN relates to a specific domain of social anxiety in adolescents, as well as the first evidence of such relations within a non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) sample. Results have important implications for theory and research into adolescent social anxiety.

Behavioral Inhibition is a temperament identified in the first years of life that enhances the risk for development of anxiety during late childhood and adolescence. Amongst children characterized with this temperament, only around 40 percent go on to develop anxiety disorders, meaning that more than half of these children do not. Over the past 20 years, research has documented within-child and socio-contextual factors that support differing developmental pathways. This review provides a historical perspective on the research documenting the origins of this temperament, its biological correlates, and the factors that enhance or mitigate risk for development of anxiety. We review as well, research findings from two longitudinal cohorts that have identified moderators of behavioral inhibition in understanding pathways to anxiety. Research on these moderators has led us to develop the Detection and Dual Control (DDC) framework to understand differing developmental trajectories among behaviorally inhibited children. In this review, we use this framework to explain why and how specific cognitive and socio-contextual factors influence differential pathways to anxiety versus resilience.

EEG methods offer a promising approach to study the development of attention or attention-related processes such as change-detection and attentional capture. However, the development of these attention processes from early to middle childhood is not well understood. In the current study, we utilized a passive three-stimulus oddball paradigm to examine age-related changes in auditory change-detection and attentional capture in a large sample of children across childhood (N = 475; 249 female, 226 male; M(age)=6.71; SD(age)=2.22; Range(age)= 4.01–11.5 years). Conventional ERP analyses revealed no age-related changes in change detection (mismatch negativity) and attentional capture (P3a) components, but we observed age-related reductions in late automatic processing of auditory change (late discriminative negativity). However, when utilizing time-frequency analyses, we observed developmental increases in frontocentral signal strength (power) and consistency (inter-trial phase synchrony) in delta and theta bands in response to novel sounds. Such frontocentral delta/theta responses have been linked in prior work to cognitive control. To further examine this possibility, we examined relations with inhibitory control. Results revealed that increased consistency in theta in response to novel sounds was related to improved inhibitory control. Together, our results advance our understanding of the development of attention in childhood. Moreover, they demonstrate the contributions of time-frequency approaches to studying neurocognitive development. Finally, our results highlight the utility of neuroimaging paradigms that have low cognitive and motor demands to study the development of psychological processes.

We examined whether family care following early-life deprivation buffered the association between stressful life events (SLEs) and executive functioning (EF) in adolescence. In early childhood, 136 institutionally reared children were randomly assigned to foster care or care-as-usual; 72 never-institutionalized children served as a comparison group. At age 16 years, adolescents (n = 143; 54% female; 67.1% Romanian) self-reported recent SLEs, completed a battery of memory and EF tasks, and completed a go/nogo task in which mediofrontal theta power (MFTP) was measured using electroencephalogram. More independent SLEs predicted lower EF and more dependent SLEs predicted lower MFTP, but only among adolescents with prolonged early deprivation. Findings provide preliminary evidence that family care following early deprivation may facilitate resilience against stress during adolescence on EF.

While it is normal to be scared of things, some children are so scared that it disrupts their lives. This is called an anxiety disorder. To help children with anxiety disorders, we need to know how anxiety disorders start. From other research we knew that toddlers who avoid new situations are more likely to become anxious later in life. They are more likely, which does not mean they all become more anxious, just some of them. We wanted to know if brain activity could predict which children would become anxious. We studied avoidance in toddlers and invited them back as preteens. We studied their brains while they were resting and while they were making mistakes in front of somebody else. We found that brain responses to mistakes predicted which avoidant toddlers became very anxious as preteens. This helps us understand who might develop anxiety, so that we can help!

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament characterized in early childhood by distress to novelty and avoidance of unfamiliar people, and it is one of the best-known risk factors for the development of social anxiety. However, nearly 60% of children with BI do not go on to meet criteria for social anxiety disorder. In this review we present an approach to understanding differential developmental trajectories among children with BI. We review research using laboratory-based tasks that isolate specific attention processes that enhance versus mitigate risk for social anxiety among behaviorally inhibited children and studies that suggest that BI is associated with heightened detection of novelty or threat. Moreover, stimulus-driven control processes, which we term "automatic control," increase the probability that behaviorally inhibited children display socially reticent behavior and develop social anxiety. In contrast, goal-driven control processes, which we term "planful control," decrease risk for anxiety. We suggest that these three categories of processes (detection, automatic control, and planful control) function together to determine whether behaviorally inhibited children are able to flexibly regulate their initial reactions to novelty, and in turn, decrease risk for social anxiety. Although laboratory-based tasks have identified these processes underlying risk and resilience, the challenge is linking them to the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors of behaviorally inhibited children in real-world contexts.

Early behaviors that differentiate later biomarkers for psychopathology can guide preventive efforts while also facilitating pathophysiological research. We test whether the error-related negativity (ERN) moderates the link between early behavior and later psychopathology in two early childhood phenotypes: behavioral inhibition and irritability. From ages 2 to 7 years, children (n=291) were assessed longitudinally for behavioral inhibition (BI) and irritability. BI was assessed via maternal report and behavioral responses to novelty. Childhood irritability was assessed using the Child Behavior Checklist. At age 12, electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while children performed a flanker task to measure the ERN, a neural indicator of error monitoring. Clinical assessments of anxiety and irritability were conducted using questionnaires (i.e., Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders and Affective Reactivity Index) and clinical interviews. Error monitoring interacted with early BI and early irritability, to predict later psychopathology. Among children with high BI, an enhanced ERN predicted greater social anxiety at age 12. In contrast, children with high childhood irritability and a blunted ERN predicted greater irritability at age 12. This converges with previous work and provides novel insight into the specificity of pathways associated with psychopathology.

Recent models of psychopathology suggest the presence of a general factor capturing the shared variance among all symptoms along with specific psychopathology factors (e.g., internalizing and externalizing). However, few studies have examined predictors that may serve as transdiagnostic risk factors for general psychopathology from early development. In the current study we examine, for the first time, whether observed and parent-reported infant temperament dimensions prospectively predict general psychopathology as well as specific psychopathology dimensions (e.g., internalizing and externalizing) across childhood. In a longitudinal cohort (N = 291), temperament dimensions were assessed at 4 months of age. Psychopathology symptoms were assessed at 7, 9, and 12 years of age. A bifactor model was used to estimate general, internalizing, and externalizing psychopathology factors. Across behavioral observations and parent-reports, higher motor activity in infancy significantly predicted greater general psychopathology in mid to late childhood. Moreover, low positive affect was predictive of the internalizing-specific factor. Other temperament dimensions were not related with any of the psychopathology factors after accounting for the general psychopathology factor. The results of this study suggest that infant motor activity may act as an early indicator of transdiagnostic risk. Our findings inform the etiology of general psychopathology and have implications for the early identification for children at risk for psychopathology.

Aperiodic activity contains important and meaningful physiological information that has been shown to dynamically change with age. However, no longitudinal studies have examined its development during early-to-mid adolescence. The current study closes this gap by investigating age- and sex-related longitudinal change in aperiodic activity across early-to-mid adolescence (N = 186; 54.3% female). Participants completed a resting state task and a Flanker task while EEG was record at age 13 years and again at age 15 years. Across different tasks and two time points, we observed significant age-related reductions in aperiodic offset and exponent. In addition, we observed significant sex-related differences in the aperiodic offset and exponent over time. We did not find any significant correlation between aperiodic activity and behavioral measures, nor did we find any significant condition-dependent change in aperiodic activity during the Flanker task. However, we did observe significant correlations between aperiodic activity across tasks and over time, suggesting that aperiodic activity may demonstrate stable trait-like characteristics. Collectively, these results may suggest a developmental parallelism between decreases in aperiodic components alongside adolescent brain development during this period; changes to cortical and subcortical brain structure and organization during early adolescence may have been responsible for the observed sex-related effects., Highlights • Early adolescence is associated with changes in the aperiodic signal. • We observed significant sex-related differences in the aperiodic signal over time. • Aperiodic activity is significantly correlated within/between tasks and over time.

This EEG methods tutorial provides both a conceptual and practical introduction to a promising data reduction approach for time-frequency representations of EEG data: Time-Frequency Principal Components Analysis (TF-PCA). Briefly, the unique value of TF-PCA is that it provides a data-reduction approach that does not rely on strong a priori constraints regarding the specific timing or frequency boundaries for an effect of interest. Given that the time-frequency characteristics of various neurocognitive process are known to change across development, the TF-PCA approach is thus particularly well suited for the analysis of developmental TF data. This tutorial provides the background knowledge, theory, and practical information needed to allow individuals with basic EEG experience to begin applying the TF-PCA approach to their own data. Crucially, this tutorial article is accompanied by a companion GitHub repository that contains example code, data, and a step-by-step guide of how to perform TF-PCA: https://github.com/NDCLab/tfpca-tutorial. Although this tutorial is framed in terms of the utility of TF-PCA for developmental data, the theory, protocols and code covered in this tutorial article and companion GitHub repository can be applied more broadly across populations of interest.

Motivation has played an integral role in understanding personality development. Two motivational systems, one associated with seeking reward (approach motivation) and one associated with avoidance of threat (avoidance motivation), have been theorized to represent individual differences in behavioral responses to the environment. However, contextual factors, particularly those with a high degree of novelty, ambiguity, and unpredictability, may simultaneously activate both systems, thereby causing approach-avoidance conflict. The resulting behavior, commonly called inhibition, is characterized by an inability to engage in motivated, goal-directed behavior and is theorized to reflect a core component of anxiety. A form of inhibition observed in childhood, behavioral inhibition (BI), is a relatively stable temperamental profile characterized by negative affect in response to unfamiliar and unpredictable contexts and is a risk factor for anxiety. Our review draws from findings in clinical and cognitive neuroscience to argue that BI reflects an increased sensitivity of both approach and avoidance motivational systems, thereby increasing the likelihood of approach-avoidance conflict within the context of unfamiliar or unpredictable stimuli and environments. Such motivational conflict activates neural systems associated with conflict monitoring, which leads to increases in arousal (e.g., sympathetic nervous system activity) and onlooking behavior, two commonly observed characteristics of childhood BI.

Error monitoring allows individuals to monitor and adapt their behavior by detecting errors. Error monitoring is thought to develop throughout childhood and adolescence. However, most of this evidence comes from studies in late childhood and adolescence utilizing ERPs. The current study utilizes time-frequency (TF) and connectivity analyses to provide a comprehensive examination of age-related changes in error monitoring processes across early childhood (N=326; 50.9% females; 4-9 years). ERP analyses indicated the presence of the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe) across age. Results showed no error-specific age-related changes in the ERN and the Pe. However, TF analyses suggested error-related frontocentral responses in delta and theta signal strength (power), delta consistency (inter-trial phase synchrony), and delta synchrony (inter-channel phase synchrony) between frontrocentral and frontolateral clusters–all of which increased with age. Additionally, the current study examines the reliability and effect size estimates of the ERP and TF measures. For most measures, more trials were needed to achieve acceptable reliability than what is commonly used in the psychophysiological literature. Resources to facilitate the measurement and reporting of reliability are provided. Overall, findings highlight the utility of TF analyses and provide useful information for future studies examining the development of error monitoring.

Relatively little is known about the relation between subthreshold error corrections and post-error behavioral compensations. The present study utilized lateralized beta power, which has been shown to index response preparation, to examine subthreshold error corrections in a task known to produce response conflict, the Simon task. We found that even when an overt correction is not made, greater activation of the corrective response, indexed by beta suppression ipsilateral to the initial responding hand, predicted post-error speeding, and enhanced post-error accuracy at the single-trial level. This provides support for the notion that response conflict associated with errors can be adaptive, and suggests that subthreshold corrections should be taken into account to fully understand error-monitoring processes. Furthermore, we expand on previous findings that demonstrate that post-error slowing and post-error accuracy can be dissociated, as well as findings that suggest that frontal midline theta oscillations and the error-related negativity (ERN) are dissociable neurocognitive processes.

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has created increased stress and anxiety for many; however, some individuals are particularly prone to heightened anxiety. It is unclear if and how prestress neurocognitive factors moderate risk for anxiety during high-stress situations. Enhanced error monitoring and a cognitive control strategy of more instantaneous (reactive) control have both been independently related to anxiety. We examined if a specific neurocognitive profile characterized by heightened error monitoring and a more reactive cognitive control strategy in adolescence predicts young adults’ anxiety trajectories across 3 early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods As part of a longitudinal study (N = 291), data were acquired in adolescence (13 years) on error monitoring (n = 124) and cognitive control strategy (n = 119). In young adulthood (18 years), anxiety was assessed three times during the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 162). Results On average, participants experienced greater anxiety in the first COVID-19 pandemic assessment, then anxiety decreased in the following months. Error monitoring and cognitive control strategy interacted to predict anxiety trajectories, such that among adolescents with an increased reliance on reactive control, error monitoring predicted greater anxiety in the first assessment but greater decreases the following months as stay-at-home orders were lifted and families adapted to the restrictions. Conclusions Results suggest that neurocognitive profiles in adolescence predict young adults’ anxiety responses during a highly stressful period, such as the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings have implications for the early identification of individuals at greater risk for anxiety.

BackgroundChildren with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit deficits in cognitive control. Neuroimaging approaches have implicated disruptions to medio-frontal cortex (MFC) structure and function. However, prior work has not directly tested whether young children with ASD exhibit disruptions to task-related theta oscillations thought to arise from the MFC.MethodsForty-three children with ASD and 24 age- and gender-matched typically developing (TD) peers performed a child-friendly Go/No-go task while 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded at kindergarten-entry. Time-frequency approaches were employed to assess the magnitude of mediofrontal theta oscillations immediately following error (vs. correct) responses (“early theta”), as well as later emerging theta oscillations (“late theta”). We tested whether error-related mediofrontal theta oscillations differed as a function of diagnosis (ASD/typical) and timing (early/late theta). Additionally, links to social and academic outcomes were tested.ResultsOverall, children showed increased theta power following error vs. correct responses. Compared to TD children, children with ASD exhibited a selective reduction in error-related mediofrontal theta power during the late theta time window. There were no significant group differences for early theta power. Moreover, reduced error-related theta power during the late, but not early, time window significantly predicted poorer academic and social skills.ConclusionsKindergarteners with ASD demonstrated a selective reduction in error-related mediofrontal theta power during a relatively late time window, which is consistent with impairments in specific cognitive processes that recruit top-down control. Targeting these particular cognitive control processes via intervention prior to school-entry may promote more successful functional outcomes for children with ASD.

Motivation influences cognitive control, particularly in childhood and adolescence. Previous work finds that the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential (ERP) linked to cognitive control following errors, is influenced by social motivation. However, it is unclear whether the influences of social motivation on the ERN extend to stimulus-locked neural correlates of cognitive control. This study reexamines how social motivation influences cognitive control in adolescence by exploring motivational influences on two stimulus-locked ERPs; the N2 and P3. Adolescent girls (8-17years of age) completed a flanker task under two different conditions. In the social condition, girls were led to believe that they were evaluated by a peer during a flanker task. In the nonsocial condition, girls completed a flanker task while evaluated by a computer. Results revealed that all girls exhibited a larger P3 in social as compared to nonsocial contexts, whereas the N2 was not different between contexts. In addition, the largest P3 enhancements were observed among younger girls. These findings suggest that social motivation influences some ERP components related to cognitive control, and such influences change across development. Additionally, findings suggest the importance of including multiple ERPs when interpreting the functional significance of motivation on cognitive control.

Individuals with a behaviorally inhibited (BI) temperament are more likely to develop social anxiety. However, the mechanisms by which socially anxious behavior emerges from BI are unclear. Variation in different forms of top-down control, specifically executive functions (EF), may play distinct roles and characterize differential pathways to social anxiety. Here 291 children were assessed for BI in toddlerhood (ages 2 and 3), parent-reported inhibitory control and set shifting during middle childhood (age 7), and multidimensional assessment of socially anxious behavior completed during late childhood and early adolescence (ages 9 and 12). Structural equation modeling revealed that early variation in BI predicted the development of socially anxious behavior through either higher levels of parent-reported inhibitory control or lower levels of parent-reported set shifting. These data reinforce the notion that top-down control does not uniformly influence relations between temperament and socially anxious behavior. These data suggest novel approaches to thinking about the role of EFs and social anxiety outcomes as children approach adolescence.

Children that have experienced psychosocial neglect display impairments in self-monitoring and controlling their behavior (cognitive control) and are at broad, transdiagnostic risk for psychopathology. However, the neural underpinnings of such effects remain unclear. Event-related mediofrontal theta oscillations reflect a neural process supporting cognitive control that may relate to transdiagnostic psychopathology risk. Recent work demonstrates reduced mediofrontal theta in rodent models of neglect; however, similar findings have not been reported in humans. Here, 136 children reared in Romanian institutions were randomly assigned to either a high-quality foster care intervention and placed with families or remained in institutions; 72 never-institutionalized children served as a comparison group. The intervention ended at 54 months; event-related mediofrontal theta and psychopathology were assessed at 12- and 16-year follow-up assessments. Institutional rearing (neglect) predicted reduced mediofrontal theta by age 16, which was linked to heightened transdiagnostic risk for psychopathology (P factor); no specific associations with internalizing/externalizing factors were present once transdiagnostic risk was accounted for. Earlier placement into foster care yielded greater mediofrontal activity by age 16. Moreover, foster care placement was associated with the developmental trajectory of mediofrontal theta across the adolescent period (ages 12-16), which was, in turn, associated with greater reductions in transdiagnostic risk across this same period. These data reflect the first experimental evidence that the development of mediofrontal theta is impacted by removal from situations of neglect in humans, and further characterizes the importance of studying developmental change in mediofrontal theta during the adolescent period.

The present study investigated the neural dynamics of error processing in both the time and frequency domains, as well as associated behavioral phenomena, at the single-trial level. We used a technique that enabled us to separately investigate the evoked and induced aspects of the EEG signal (Cohen & Donner, 2013, Journal of Neurophysiology, 110[12], 2752-2763). We found that at the single-trial level, while the (evoked) error-related negativity (ERN) predicted only post-error slowing (PES)-and only when errors occurred on incongruent trials-induced frontal midline theta power served as a robust predictor of both PES and post-error accuracy (PEA) regardless of stimulus congruency. Mediation models of both electrophysiological indices demonstrated that although the relationship between theta and PEA was mediated by PES, there was not a relationship between the ERN and PEA. Our data suggest that although the ERN and frontal midline theta index functionally related underlying cognitive processes, they are not simply the same process manifested in different domains. In addition, our findings are consistent with the adaptive theory of post-error slowing, as PES was positively associated with post-error accuracy at the single-trial level. More generally, our study provides additional support for the inclusion of a time-frequency approach to better understand the role of medial frontal cortex in action monitoring.

Cognitive control develops rapidly over the first decade of life, with one of the dominant changes being a transition from reliance on 'as-needed' control (reactive control) to a more planful, sustained form of control (proactive control). Although the emergence of proactive control is important for mature behavior, we know little about how this transition takes place, the neural correlates of this transition, and whether development of executive functions influences the ability to adopt a proactive control strategy. This study addresses these questions, focusing on the transition from reactive to proactive control in a cross-sectional sample of 79 children-forty-one 5-year-olds and thirty-eight 9-year-olds. Children completed an adapted version of the AX-Continuous Performance Task while electroencephalography was recorded and a standardized executive function battery was administered. Results revealed 5-year-olds predominantly employed reactive strategies, whereas 9-year-olds used proactive strategies. Use of proactive control was predicted by working memory ability, above and beyond other executive functions. Moreover, when enacting proactive control, greater increases in neural activity underlying working memory updating were observed; links between working memory ability and proactive control strategy use were mediated by such neural activity. These results provide convergent evidence that the transition from reactive to proactive control may be dependent on age-related changes in neurocognitive indices of working memory and that working memory may influence adopting a proactive control strategy.

Compared to adult EEG, EEG signals recorded from pediatric populations have shorter recording periods and contain more artifact contamination. Therefore, pediatric EEG data necessitate specific preprocessing approaches in order to remove environmental noise and physiological artifacts without losing large amounts of data. However, there is presently a scarcity of standard automated preprocessing pipelines suitable for pediatric EEG.In an effort to achieve greater standardization of EEG preprocessing, and in particular for the analysis of pediatric data, we developed the Maryland Analysis of Developmental EEG (MADE) pipeline as an automated preprocessing pipeline compatible with EEG data recorded with different hardware systems, different populations, levels of artifact contamination, and length of recordings. MADE uses EEGLAB and functions from some EEGLAB plugins, and includes additional customizable features particularly useful for EEG data collected from pediatric populations.MADE processes event-related and resting state EEG from raw data files through a series of preprocessing steps and outputs processed clean data ready to be analyzed in time, frequency, or time-frequency domain. MADE provides a report file at the end of the preprocessing that describes a variety of features of the processed data to facilitate the assessment of the quality of processed data. In this paper we discuss some practical issues, which are specifically relevant to pediatric EEG preprocessing. We also provide custom-written scripts to address these practical issues.MADE is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License at https://github.com/ChildDevLab/MADE-EEG-preprocessing-pipeline.

Social anxiety typically emerges by adolescence and is one of the most common anxiety disorders. Many clinicians and researchers utilize the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARED) to quantify anxiety symptoms, including social anxiety, throughout childhood and adolescence. The SCARED can be administered to both children and their parents, though reports from each informant tend to only moderately correlate. Here, we investigated parent–child concordance on the SCARED in a sample of adolescents (N = 360, M(age) = 13.2) using a multi-trait multi-method (MTMM) model. Next, in a selected sample of the adolescents, we explored relations among child report, parent report, and latent social anxiety scores with two laboratory tasks known to elicit signs of social anxiety in the presence of unfamiliar peers: a speech task and a “Get to Know You” task. Findings reveal differences in variance of the SCARED accounted for by parent and child report. Parent report of social anxiety is a better predictor of anxiety signs elicited by a structured speech task, whereas child report of social anxiety is a better predictor of anxiety signs during the naturalistic conversation with unfamiliar peers. Moreover, while latent social anxiety scores predict both observed anxiety measures, parent report more closely resembles latent scores in relation to the speech task, whereas child report functions more similarly to latent scores in relation to the peer conversation. Thus, while latent scores relate to either observed anxiety measure, parent and child report on the SCARED each provide valuable information that differentially relate to naturalistic social anxiety-related behaviors.

In social interactions, we rely on nonverbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behavior of others. How we react to these cues is affected by whether they are believed to originate from an entity with a mind, capable of having internal states (i.e., mind perception). While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to social-cognitive processes like mind perception, the degree to which activation within this network relates to performance in subsequent social-cognitive tasks remains unclear. In the current study, participants performed a mind perception task (i.e., judging the likelihood that faces, varying in physical human-likeness, have internal states) while event-related fMRI was collected. Afterwards, participants performed a social attention task outside the scanner, during which they were cued by the gaze of the same faces that they previously judged within the mind perception task. Parametric analyses of the fMRI data revealed that activity within ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was related to both mind ratings inside the scanner and gaze-cueing performance outside the scanner. In addition, other social brain regions were related to gaze-cueing performance, including frontal areas like the left insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus, as well as temporal areas like the left temporo-parietal junction and bilateral temporal gyri. The findings suggest that functions subserved by the vmPFC are relevant to both mind perception and social attention, implicating a role of vmPFC in the top-down modulation of low-level social-cognitive processes.

The ability to self-detect errors and dynamically adapt behavior is a cornerstone of higher-level cognition, requiring coordinated activity from a network of neural regions. However, disagreement exists over how the error-monitoring system develops throughout adolescence and early adulthood. The present report leveraged MRI-constrained EEG source localization to detail typical development of the error-monitoring system in a sample of 9-35 year-olds (n = 43). Participants performed a flanker task while high-density EEG was recorded; structural MRIs were also acquired for all participants. Analysis of the scalp-recorded EEG data revealed a frontocentral negativity (error-related negativity; ERN) immediately following errors for all participants, although the topography of the ERN varied with age. Source localization of the ERN time range revealed maximal activity within the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) for all ages, consistent with recent evidence that the PCC provides a substantial contribution to the scalp-recorded ERN. Activity within a network of brain regions, including dorsal anterior cingulate, PCC, and parietal cortex, was predictive of improved performance following errors, regardless of age. However, additional activity within insula, orbitofrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus linearly increased with age. Together, these data suggest that the core error-monitoring system is online by early adolescence and remains relatively stable into adulthood. However, additional brain regions become embedded within this core network with age. These results serve as a model of typical development of the error-monitoring system from early adolescence into adulthood.

It is well established that certain social cues, such as averted eye gaze, can automatically initiate the orienting of another's spatial attention. However, whether human posture can also reflexively cue spatial attention remains unclear. The present study directly investigated whether averted neutral postures reflexively cue the attention of observers in a normal population of college students. Similar to classic gaze-cuing paradigms, non-predictive averted posture stimuli were presented prior to the onset of a peripheral target stimulus at one of five SOAs (100 ms–500 ms). Participants were instructed to move their eyes to the target as fast as possible. Eye-tracking data revealed that participants were significantly faster in initiating saccades when the posture direction was congruent with the target stimulus. Since covert attention shifts precede overt shifts in an obligatory fashion, this suggests that directional postures reflexively orient the attention of others. In line with previous work on gaze-cueing, the congruency effect of posture cue was maximal at the 300 ms SOA. These results support the notion that a variety of social cues are used by the human visual system in determining the “direction of attention” of others, and also suggest that human body postures are salient stimuli capable of automatically shifting an observer's attention.

Empirical evidence indicates that detecting one's own mistakes can serve as a signal to improve task performance. However, little work has focused on how task constraints, such as the response–stimulus interval (RSI), influence post-error adjustments. In the present study, event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral measures were used to investigate the time course of error-related processing while humans performed a difficult visual discrimination task. We found that error commission resulted in a marked reduction in both task performance and sensory processing on the following trial when RSIs were short, but that such impairments were not detectable at longer RSIs. Critically, diminished sensory processing at short RSIs, indexed by the stimulus-evoked P1 component, was predicted by an ERP measure of error processing, the Pe component. A control analysis ruled out a general lapse in attention or mind wandering as being predictive of subsequent reductions in sensory processing; instead, the data suggest that error detection causes an attentional bottleneck, which can diminish sensory processing on subsequent trials that occur in short succession. The findings demonstrate that the neural system dedicated to monitoring and improving behavior can, paradoxically, at times be the source of performance failures.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTThe performance-monitoring system is a network of brain regions dedicated to monitoring behavior to adjust task performance when necessary. Previous research has demonstrated that activation of the performance monitoring system following incorrect decisions serves to improve future task performance. However, the present study provides evidence that, when perceptual decisions must be made rapidly (within approximately half a second of each other), activation of the performance-monitoring system is predictive of impaired task-related attention on the subsequent trial. The data illustrate that the cognitive demands imposed by error processing can interfere with, rather than enhance, task-related attention when subsequent decisions need to be made quickly.

Early behaviors that differentiate later biomarkers for psychopathology can guide preventive efforts while also facilitating pathophysiological research. We tested whether error-related negativity (ERN) moderates the link between early behavior and later psychopathology in two early childhood phenotypes: behavioral inhibition and irritability. From ages 2 to 7 years, children (n = 291) were assessed longitudinally for behavioral inhibition (BI) and irritability. Behavioral inhibition was assessed via maternal report and behavioral responses to novelty. Childhood irritability was assessed using the Child Behavior Checklist. At age 12, an electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while children performed a flanker task to measure ERN, a neural indicator of error monitoring. Clinical assessments of anxiety and irritability were conducted using questionnaires (i.e., Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders and Affective Reactivity Index) and clinical interviews. Error monitoring interacted with early BI and early irritability to predict later psychopathology. Among children with high BI, an enhanced ERN predicted greater social anxiety at age 12. In contrast, children with high childhood irritability and blunted ERN predicted greater irritability at age 12. This converges with previous work and provides novel insight into the specificity of pathways associated with psychopathology.

Theta oscillations (4–8 Hz) provide an organizing principle of cognitive control, allowing goal-directed behavior. In adults, theta power over medial-frontal cortex (MFC) underlies conflict/error monitoring, whereas theta connectivity between MFC and lateral-frontal regions reflects cognitive control recruitment. However, prior work has not separated theta responses that occur before and immediately after a motor response, nor explained how medial-lateral connectivity drives different kinds of control behaviors. Theta's role during adolescence, a developmental window characterized by a motivation-control mismatch also remains unclear. As social observation is known to influence motivation, this might be a particularly important context for studying adolescent theta dynamics. Here, adolescents performed a flanker task alone or under social observation. Focusing first on the nonsocial context, we parsed cognitive control into dissociable subprocesses, illustrating how theta indexes distinct components of cognitive control working together dynamically to produce goal-directed behavior. We separated theta power immediately before/after motor responses, identifying behavioral links to conflict monitoring and error monitoring, respectively. MFC connectivity was separated before/after responses and behaviorally-linked to reactive and proactive control, respectively. Finally, distinct forms of post-error control were dissociated, based on connectivity with rostral/caudal frontal cortex. Social observation was found to exclusively upregulate theta measures indexing post-response error monitoring and proactive control, as opposed to conflict monitoring and reactive control. Linking adolescent cognitive control to theta oscillations provides a bridge between non-invasive recordings in humans and mechanistic studies of neural oscillations in animal models; links to social observation provide insight into the motivation-control interactions that occur during adolescence.

A major challenge for electroencephalograph (EEG) studies on pediatric populations is that large amounts of data are lost due to artifacts (e.g., movement and blinks). Independent component analysis (ICA) can separate artifactual and neural activity, allowing researchers to remove such artifactual activity and retain a greater percentage of EEG data for analyses. However, manual identification of artifactual components is time-consuming and requires subjective judgment. Automated algorithms, like ADJUST and ICLabel, have been validated on adults, but to our knowledge, no such algorithms have been optimized for pediatric data. Therefore, in an attempt to automate artifact selection for pediatric data collected with geodesic nets, we modified ADJUST's algorithm. Our "adjusted-ADJUST" algorithm was compared to the "original-ADJUST" algorithm and ICLabel in adults, children, and infants on three different performance measures: respective classification agreement with expert coders, the number of trials retained following artifact removal, and the reliability of the EEG signal after preprocessing with each algorithm. Overall, the adjusted-ADJUST algorithm performed better than the original-ADJUST algorithm and no ICA correction with adult and pediatric data. Moreover, in some measures, it performed better than ICLabel for pediatric data. These results indicate that optimizing existing algorithms improves artifact classification and retains more trials, potentially facilitating EEG studies with pediatric populations. Adjusted-ADJUST is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License at: https://github.com/ChildDevLab/MADE-EEG-preprocessing-pipeline/tree/master/adjusted_adjust_scripts.

Objective Children with the temperament of behavioral inhibition (BI) face increased risk for developing an anxiety disorder later in life. However, not all children with BI manifest anxiety symptoms, and use of a cognitive control strategy could moderate the pathway between BI and anxiety. Individuals vary widely in the strategy used to instantiate control. The present study examined whether a more planful style of cognitive control (ie, proactive control) or a more impulsive strategy of control (ie, reactive control) would moderate the association between early BI and later anxiety symptoms. Method Participants were part of a longitudinal study examining the relations between BI (measured at 2–3 years of age) and later anxiety symptoms (measured at 13 years). Use of a cognitive control strategy was assessed at 13 years using the AX variant of the continuous performance task. Results BI in toddlerhood significantly predicted increased use of a more reactive cognitive control style in adolescence. In addition, cognitive control strategy moderated the relation between BI and anxious symptoms, such that reliance on a more reactive strategy predicted higher levels of anxiety for children high in BI. Conclusion The present study is the first to identify the specific control strategy that increases risk for anxiety. Thus, it is not cognitive control per se, but the specific control strategy children adopt that could increase risk for anxiety later in life. These findings have important implications for future evidence-based interventions because they suggest that an emphasis on decreasing reactive cognitive control and increasing proactive cognitive control might decrease anxious cognition.

BACKGROUND: Clinical researchers face challenges when trying to quantify diverse processes engaged during social interactions. We report results from two studies, each demonstrating the potential utility of tools for examining processes engaged during social interactions. METHOD: In the first study, youth (n = 57) used a smartphone‐based tool to rate mood and responses to social events. A subset (n = 20) completed the second, functional magnetic resonance imaging study. This second study related anxiety to error‐evoked brain responses in two social conditions—while being observed and when alone. We also combined these tools to bridge clinical, social‐contextual, and neural levels of measurement. RESULTS: Results from the first study showed an association between negatively-perceived social experiences and a range of negative emotions. In the second study there was a positive correlation during error monitoring between social‐anxiety severity and context‐specific activation of the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex. Finally, during imaging, the perceived quality of peer interactions as assessed using the smartphone‐based tool, interacted with social context to predict levels of activation in the hippocampus and superior frontal gyrus. CONCLUSIONS: By improving measurement, enhanced tools may provide new means for studying relationships among anxiety, brain function, and social interactions.

Highlights • Reward reduced RT interference during reactive control, but increased RT interference during proactive control in male adolescents. • Increased reward-related cue-locked theta power was associated with increased RT interference on proactive trials. • Increased reward-related stimulus-locked theta inter-channel phase synchrony was related to facilitated performance on proactive trials., Adolescence is marked by increased reward-seeking, which can alter cognitive control abilities. Previous research found that rewards actually improve cognitive control in children, adolescents, and adults, but these studies only investigated reactive control. The goal of the current study was to elucidate reward’s influence on both proactive and reactive control during adolescence. To this end, 68 (Mean age = 13.61, SD = 2.52) male adolescents completed a rewarded cued flanker paradigm while electroencephalogram (EEG) was collected. Theta power and inter-channel phase synchrony, both implicated in cognitive control, were quantified after cues and stimuli to understand their role during reward-cognitive control interactions. The data suggest that reward reduced interference during reactive control; however, reward increased interference during proactive control in this sample of adolescent males. Reward-related increases in cue-locked theta power predicted more reward-related RT interference on proactive trials. In contrast, increases in stimulus-locked theta ICPS were associated with better performance on rewarded proactive trials. The pattern of results show that reward differentially impacted proactive and reactive control in adolescence, which may have implications for the increased risk-taking behaviors observed during adolescence.

The Val158Met rs4680 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) at the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene, primarily involved in dopamine breakdown within prefrontal cortex, has shown relations with inhibitory control (IC) in both adults and children. However, little is known about how COMT genotype relates to developmental trajectories of inhibitory control throughout childhood. Here, our study explored the effects of the COMT genotype (Val/Val, Val/Met, and Met/Met) on IC trajectories between the ages of 5 and 10 years. Children (n=222) completed a Go/Nogo task at ages 5, 7, and 10; IC was characterized using signal detection theory to examine IC performance (d’) and response strategy (criterion). COMT genotype was not related to initial levels of IC performance and response strategy at age 5 or change in response strategy from ages 5 to 10. In contrast, COMT genotype was related to change in IC performance between 5 and 10 years. While Val/Val children did not differ from Val/Met children in development of IC performance, children with the Met/Met genotype exhibited more rapid development of IC performance when compared to Val/Met peers. These results suggest that COMT genotype modulates the development of IC performance in middle childhood.

Although electrophysiological (electroencephalography) measures of executive functions (e.g. error monitoring) have been used to predict academic achievement in typically developing children, work investigating a link between error monitoring and academic skills in children with autism spectrum disorder is limited. In this study, we employed traditional electrophysiological and advanced time–frequency methods, combined with principal component analyses, to extract neural activity related to error monitoring and tested their relations to academic achievement in cognitively able kindergarteners with autism spectrum disorder. In total, 35 cognitively able kindergarteners with autism spectrum disorder completed academic assessments and the child-friendly “Zoo Game” Go/No-go task at school entry. The Go/No-go task successfully elicited an error-related negativity and error positivity in children with autism spectrum disorder as young as 5 years at fronto-central and posterior electrode sites, respectively. We also observed increased response-related theta power during errors relative to correct trials at fronto-central sites. Both larger error positivity and theta power significantly predicted concurrent academic achievement after controlling for behavioral performance on the Zoo Game and intelligence quotient. These results suggest that the use of time–frequency electroencephalography analyses, combined with traditional event-related potential measures, may provide new opportunities to investigate neurobiological mechanisms of executive function and academic achievement in young children with autism spectrum disorder.

Objective Although behaviorally inhibited (BI) temperament predicts risk for anxiety, anxiety in BI may involve distinct neural responses to errors. The current study examines the relations between anxiety and neural correlates of error processing both in youths identified as BI in early childhood and in youths seeking treatment for an anxiety disorder. Method All participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging using a flanker task to assess responses to errors. A study in healthy subjects assessed test−retest reliability to inform analyses in two other samples. For one sample, a cohort of BI youths (Low BI, n = 28; High BI, n = 27) was followed into adolescence. For the other, participants were recruited based on the presence or absence of an anxiety disorder. Using identical methods in medication-free subjects, analyses compared relations between anxiety and error processing across the two samples. Results Error-processing exhibited acceptable reliability. Within a ventromedial−prefrontal−cortex (vmPFC) cluster, anxiety related to error processing only in youths whose early-life BI status was known. In the high BI group, anxiety related to reduced neural response to errors. No such associations manifested in treatment-seeking youths. Other analyses mapped relations between error-processing and anxiety in each sample on its own. However, only the vmPFC cluster statistically differentiated the neural correlates of anxiety in BI. Conclusion BI temperament may define a unique pathway into anxiety involving perturbed neural responding to errors. Although BI is a risk factor for later anxiety, the neural and associated features of anxiety in BI youths may differ from those in treatment-seeking youths.

Cognitive control supports goal-directed behavior and involves two main components: 1) monitoring for situations requiring control, such as errors or conflict; 2) control recruitment, either proactively before needed or reactively in a just-in-time manner. In adults, increased theta power over medial-frontal cortex (MFC) underlies monitoring, whereas theta connectivity between MFC and lateral-frontal regions reflects control recruitment. Theta oscillations have been proposed as an organizing principle of cognitive control in human adults and are conserved across species. However, the role of theta in supporting adolescent cognitive control remains unclear. Moreover, adolescence is characterized by a motivation-control mismatch, with social motivation being particularly salient. Characterizing theta band dynamics could clarify motivational influences on cognitive control during this developmental window. Here, we investigated theta dynamics while adolescents performed a flanker task twice, once alone and once believing they were under peer observation to increase social motivation. Broadly, theta dynamics were found to behave qualitatively similar to prior reports in adults. In a novel approach, we separated theta dynamics immediately before and after motor responses, identifying specific cognitive control mechanisms. We dissociate MFC connectivity with rostral/caudal frontal cortex and distinct forms of post-error behavioral control, as well as identified inverse relations between pre- and post-response control. Finally, social motivation was found to exclusively upregulate post-response error monitoring and proactive control, as opposed to pre-response conflict monitoring and reactive control. Collectively, the current study links theta to adolescent cognitive control, identifies specific effects of social motivation on proactive control, and more broadly identifies novel cognitive control dynamics.

OBJECTIVE: A role for aberrant reward processing in the pathogenesis of depression has long been proposed. However, no review has yet examined its role in depression by integrating conceptual and quantitative findings across functional MRI (fMRI) and EEG methodologies. The authors quantified these effects, with an emphasis on development. METHOD: A total of 38 fMRI and 12 EEG studies were entered into fMRI and EEG meta-analyses. fMRI studies primarily examined reward anticipation and reward feedback. These were analyzed using the activation likelihood estimation method. EEG studies involved mainly the feedback-related negativity (FRN) event-related potential, and these studies were analyzed using random-effects meta-analysis of the association between FRN and depression. RESULTS: Analysis of fMRI studies revealed significantly reduced striatal activation in depressed compared with healthy individuals during reward feedback. When region-of-interest analyses were included, reduced activation was also observed in reward anticipation, an effect that was stronger in individuals under age 18. FRN was also significantly reduced in depression, with pronounced effects in individuals under age 18. In longitudinal studies, reduced striatal activation in fMRI and blunted FRN in EEG were found to precede the onset of depression in adolescents. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, the findings show consistent neural aberrations during reward processing in depression, namely, reduced striatal signal during feedback and blunted FRN. These aberrations may underlie the pathogenesis of depression and have important implications for development of new treatments.