Individual Differences in Error-Related Brain Activity and Post-Error Slowing in Children

Errors play a crucial role in learning and goal-directed behavior by triggering cognitive adjustments to optimize future task performance. One such adjustment is post-error slowing (PES), the tendency to respond more slowly after an error. In adults, PES has been associated with regions implicated in error processing, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and anterior insula. The prolonged maturation of these regions is thought to contribute to less efficient error processing in children and PES compared to adults. Additionally, while some errors may be immediately corrected, resulting in isolated errors, others may require multiple correction attempts, resulting in consecutive errors. Compared to adults, children may need more attempts to correct their errors due to the ongoing neurodevelopment of error processing. We investigated age differences in error types and in PES between children (N = 159, 8-11 years) and adults (N = 40, 20-30 years) during task switching. We tested whether individual differences in error processing-related activation contributed to PES within a subsample of children that performed the task during scanning (N = 72). Children made mostly consecutive errors, whereas adults made mostly isolated errors. PES magnitudes were larger in adults than in children. Children showed enhanced error-related activity in dorsal ACC and the anterior insula. Enhanced error-related activity in the insula was associated with better performance and reduced switch costs. These findings suggest that the neurodevelopment of error processing in late childhood contributes to the improved ability to adjust behavior following errors, and consequently to task-switching performance.