From prediction to control: Age-related dissociations between implicit regularity encoding and attentional modulation
Roula Jamous1, Katharina Graf1, Leonore Luise Ilgenstein1
1Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, TU Dresden, Schubertstrasse 42, Dresden 03107, Germany.
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
|May 13, 2026
Summary
Adolescents can implicitly learn environmental regularities but struggle to use this knowledge flexibly. This suggests developing top-down control mechanisms are crucial for translating learned information into goal-directed behavior.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Adolescence is critical for cognitive control development.
- Understanding how learned regularities become flexible behavior is unclear.
- The brain's ability to integrate predictability into action control is still under investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if adolescents exploit task-irrelevant predictability for perception-action integration.
- To compare behavioral and neural responses of adolescents and adults in a distractor-response binding task.
- To explore the developmental trajectory of using learned regularities for flexible behavior.
Main Methods:
- Distractor-response binding paradigm with varying predictability.
- Electroencephalography (EEG) recording for neural activity.
- Behavioral analysis and time-frequency analyses, including multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA).
Main Results:
- Adults, unlike adolescents, showed behavioral benefits from high predictability.
- Adults exhibited specific theta and alpha-band modulations linked to binding and attention.
- (Pre-)adolescents showed intact representation of predictability but failed to use it behaviorally.
Conclusions:
- Adolescents implicitly encode environmental regularities but lack mature top-down control to utilize them flexibly.
- A developmental shift from representation to regulation is observed.
- Maturation of alpha-theta coordination is linked to flexible action control emergence in adolescence.
Related Concept Videos
01:28Perception
Perception is a fundamental psychological process that enables individuals to organize, interpret, and consciously experience sensory information. This process is crucial for understanding and interacting with the world around us. It includes both bottom-up and top-down processing, each playing a distinct role in how we perceive our environment.
Bottom-up processing begins at the sensory level, where receptors detect external environmental stimuli. These could include the tactile sensation of...
Bottom-up processing begins at the sensory level, where receptors detect external environmental stimuli. These could include the tactile sensation of...
01:28Automatic Processing and Automatic Social Behavior
Automatic processing refers to the cognitive operations that occur without conscious intent or awareness, playing a fundamental role in shaping social cognition and behavior. These processes enable individuals to navigate complex social environments efficiently by relying on mental shortcuts and pre-existing knowledge structures known as schemas. One of the most influential mechanisms underlying automatic processing is priming, which subtly activates mental representations through exposure to...