The development of cool and hot inhibitory control from late childhood to young adulthood: An ERP study

Inhibitory control (IC) is not a unitary construct but involves cool and hot dimensions. Although their behavioral development is documented, little is known about their underlying neural dynamics from late childhood to early adulthood, with EEG evidence remaining scarce. Therefore, this study characterized the developmental trajectories of cool and hot IC and identified their associated electrophysiological patterns. Children, adolescents, and young adults completed two Stroop-like tasks: a cool Stroop task requiring color naming independent of word meaning, and a hot Stroop task requiring identification of facial emotional expressions independent of emotion words. Behavioral performances were assessed through reaction times and accuracy. ERP analyses focused on the N2, P3, and early and late stages of the Late Positive Potential (LPP). We showed that emotional context modulates behavioral performance, along with electrophysiological data revealing enhanced allocation of attentional resources to emotional information at early N2 and P3 stages and at the LPP stage, with stronger N2 and LPP effects in younger participants. ERP findings indicate that interference effects are reflected in late-stage processing as indexed by the LPP component, consistent with post-evaluative rather than early conflict-monitoring processes. Finally, although faces expressing low-intensity emotions might facilitate processing, this effect varies across development; by contrast, emotional conflict in adolescence increases late-stage processing demands, as indexed by late LPP modulation. This pattern is associated with a delayed maturation of hot IC compared to cool IC. Overall, these findings highlight the joint influence of emotion perception and development on conflict processing at behavioral and neural levels.