A psychophysiological examination of conflict processing throughout adult maturation using the manual colour word stroop task
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1
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
It is consistently found that older adults and adolescents are more impaired than their adult counterparts on tasks requiring conflict processing. To develop a better understanding of this limitation and how it evolves the electrical activity of the brain was examined as adolescents (16-17), young adults (20-30) and older adults (45-65) preformed a Stroop task. This task was designed to isolate processing when task irrelevant distracting information induces conflict in the brain. Adolescents, young adults and older adults performed similarly in terms of reaction time and accuracy however, the underlying brain activity was significantly different. The P3a component was significantly larger and delayed in older adults indicating additional processing for reorienting attention. Additionally the onset of the P1 and N2 was significantly delayed in the adolescent group however the onset of the P3b was earliest in this group. This indicates that adolescents’ visual attention had stronger processing demands and this aided subsequent stimulus categorization. Also between 420-480ms after stimulus presentation there was a negative depression (N450) which is related to response conflict. This was significantly enhanced in older adults and showed an increased left activation in adolescents indicating additional processing requirements for response conflict. Overall even though adult level performance was exhibited across the three groups the underlying neural activity indicates that the brain employs different cognitive strategies to compensate for limitations at different levels of processing across the adult lifespan.
Keywords:
decision-making,
P3
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Decision Making, Reward Processing & Response Selection
Citation:
Killikelly
CA and
Szucs
D
(2011). A psychophysiological examination of conflict processing throughout adult maturation using the manual colour word stroop task.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00372
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Received:
23 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Clare A Killikelly, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, clare.killikelly@gmail.com