Sensory gating, inhibition control and child intelligence: an event-related potentials study

The current study explored the relationship among sensory gating, inhibition control and human intelligence in two groups of children with different intellectual levels. A Go-Nogo task was adopted to investigate children's behavioral performances in inhibition control processing, and a paired-click paradigm with event-related potentials (ERP) recording was used to explore children's neural activation during sensory gating processing. The behavioral results showed that the intellectually gifted children committed significantly less commission error rate, which indicated that gifted children had better inhibition control than their average peers. The electrophysiological results showed that the gifted group had lower S2P50/S1P50 amplitude ratio than the average group and illustrated that gifted children had stronger sensory gating. The results of correlation analysis between inhibition control performances and sensory gating showed that children with stronger P50 suppression (lower S2/S1 latency ratio) in the fronto-central area and stronger N100 suppression (lower S2/S1 amplitude ratio) in the frontal and fronto-central areas had shorter reaction time in the Go-Nogo task. Moreover, the correlation patterns between sensory gating and inhibition control were different between two groups of children. The present findings further demonstrated the close relationship among sensory gating, inhibition control and human intelligence in children.