Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 21, 2026
Event-related Potentials During Target-response Tasks to Study Cognitive Processes of Upper Limb Use in Children with Unilateral Cerebral Palsy
Published on: January 11, 2016
Development of the time course for processing conflict: an event-related potentials study with 4 year olds and adults
M Rosario Rueda1, Michael I Posner, Mary K Rothbart
1Psychology Dept, University of Oregon, Eugene, USA. rorueda@ugr.es
Background:
Tasks involving conflict are widely used to study executive attention. In the flanker task, a target stimulus is surrounded by distracting information that can be congruent or incongruent with the correct response. Developmental differences in the time course of brain activations involved in conflict processing were examined for 22 four year old children and 18 adults. Subjects performed a child-friendly flanker task while their brain activity was registered using a high-density electroencephalography system.
Results:
General differences were found in the amplitude and time course of event-related potentials (ERPs) between children and adults that are consistent with their differences in reaction time. In addition, the congruency of flankers affected both the amplitude and latency of some of the ERP components. These effects were delayed and sustained for longer periods of time in the children compared to the adults.
Conclusions:
These differences constitute neural correlates of children's greater difficulty in monitoring and resolving conflict in this and similar tasks.
