A Brain-Based Account of the Development of Rule Use In Childhood (original) (raw)
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Flexible rule use: Common neural substrates in children and adults
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2012
Flexible rule-guided behavior develops gradually, and requires the ability to remember the rules, switch between them as needed, and implement them in the face of competing information. Our goals for this study were twofold: first, to assess whether these components of rule-guided behavior are separable at the neural level, and second, to identify age-related differences in one or more component that could support the emergence of increasingly accurate and flexible rule use over development. We collected event-related fMRI data while 36 children aged 8-13 and adults aged 20-27 performed a task that manipulated rule representation, rule switching, and stimulus incongruency. Several regions -left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), left posterior parietal cortex, and pre-supplementary motor area -were engaged by both the rule representation and the rule-switching manipulations. These regions were engaged similarly across age groups, though contrasting timecourses of activation in left DLPFC suggest that children updated task rules more slowly than did adults. These findings support the idea that common networks can contribute to a variety of executive functions, and that some developmental changes take the form of changes in temporal dynamics rather than qualitative changes in the network of brain regions engaged.
Structure and Implementation of Novel Task Rules: A Cross-Sectional Developmental Study
Psychological science, 2018
Rule-based performance improves remarkably throughout childhood. The present study examined how children and adolescents structured tasks and implemented rules when novel task instructions were presented in a child-friendly version of a novel instruction-learning paradigm. Each miniblock started with the presentation of new stimulus-response mappings for a go task. Before this mapping could be implemented, subjects had to make responses in order to advance through screens during a preparatory (" next") phase. Children (4-11 years old) and late adolescents (17-19 years old) responded more slowly during the next phase when the next response was incompatible with the instructed stimulus-response mapping. This instruction-based interference effect was more pronounced in young children than in older children. We argue that these findings are most consistent with age-related differences in rule structuring. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of rule-based p...
Dissociable Components of Rule-Guided Behavior Depend on Distinct Medial and Prefrontal Regions
Science, 2009
Much of our behavior is guided by rules. Although human prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are implicated in implementing rule-guided behavior, the crucial contributions made by different regions within these areas are not yet specified. In an attempt to bridge human neuropsychology and nonhuman primate neurophysiology, we report the effects of circumscribed lesions to macaque orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), principal sulcus (PS), superior dorsolateral PFC, ventrolateral PFC, or ACC sulcus, on separable cognitive components of a Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) analog. Only the PS lesions impaired maintenance of abstract rules in working memory; only the OFC lesions impaired rapid reward-based updating of representations of rule value; the ACC sulcus lesions impaired active reference to the value of recent choice-outcomes during rule-based decision-making.
The Journal of Neuroscience, 2017
Humans use rules to organize their actions to achieve specific goals. While simple rules that link a sensory stimulus to one response may suffice in some situations, often the application of multiple, hierarchically-organized rules is required. Recent theories suggest that progressively higher level rules are encoded along an anterior-to-posterior gradient within PFC. While some work supports the existence of such a functional gradient, other studies argue for a lesser degree of specialization within PFC. We used fMRI to investigate whether rules at different hierarchical levels are represented at distinct locations in the brain or encoded by a single system. Thirty-seven male and female participants represented and applied hierarchical rule sets containing one lower-level stimulus-response rule and one higher-level selection rule. We used multivariate pattern analysis to directly investigate the representation of rules at each hierarchical level in absence of information about rules from other levels or other task-related information, thus providing a clear identification of low- and high-level rule representations. We could decode low- and high-level rules from local patterns of brain activity within a wide frontoparietal network. However, no significant difference existed between regions encoding representations of rules from both levels, except for precentral gyrus that represented only low-level rule information. Our findings show that the brain represents conditional rules irrespective of their level in the explored hierarchy, and thus that the human control system did not organize task representation according to this dimension. Our paradigm represents a promising approach to identify critical principles that shape this control system.
A connectionist single mechanism account of rule-like behavior in infancy
Proceedings of the …, 2000
One of the most controversial issues in cognitive science pertains to whether rules are necessary to explain complex behavior. Nowhere has the debate over rules been more heated than within the field of language acquisition. Most researchers agree on the need for statistical learning mechanisms in language acquisition, but disagree on whether rule-learning components are also needed. Marcus, Vijayan, Rao, & Vishton (1999) have provided evidence of rule-like behavior which they claim can only be explained by a dual- ...
Effects of age, reminders, and task difficulty on young children's rule-switching flexibility
Cognitive Development, 2004
To test preschoolers’ ability to flexibly switch between abstract rules differing in difficulty, ninty-three 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were instructed to switch from an (easier) shape-sorting to a (harder) function-sorting rule, or vice versa. Children learned one rule, sorted four test sets, then learned the other rule, and sorted four more sets. In a control condition, seventy-two 3–5-year-old children learned one rule and were re-trained on that rule before the second test block. Half of each group received metacognitive reminders to “think about” the current rule before each test trial. The shape rule was easier: many 3-year-olds failed to follow the function rule, confirming findings of Deák et al. (2002). Switching rules did not reduce overall rule-following. However, reminders facilitated rule-following when rules were switched, but not when a rule was repeated (i.e., control condition). Reminders actually reduced rule-following by control children who got the easier (shape) rule. The results show (1) 4-year-olds readily switch between abstract rules, even if the second rule requires ignoring obvious, conflicting perceptual information (i.e., shape); (2) some rule-switching tasks do not impose performance costs on children, and (3) children’s rule-following consistency and flexibility depend on the nature of available social support.
Abstract Rule Learning: The Differential Effects of Lesions in Frontal Cortex
Cerebral Cortex, 2013
Learning progressively more abstract stimulus-response mappings requires progressively more anterior regions of the lateral frontal cortex. Using an individual differences approach, we studied subjects with frontal lesions performing a hierarchical reinforcement-learning task to investigate how frontal cortex contributes to abstract rule learning. We predicted that subjects with lesions of the left pre-premotor (pre-PMd) cortex, a region implicated in abstract rule learning, would demonstrate impaired acquisition of second-order, as opposed to first-order, rules. We found that 4 subjects with such lesions did indeed demonstrate a second-order rule-learning impairment, but that these subjects nonetheless performed better than subjects with other frontal lesions in a second-order rule condition. This finding resulted from both their restricted exploration of the feature space and the task structure of this condition, for which they identified partially representative first-order rules. Significantly, across all subjects, suboptimal but above-chance performance in this condition correlated with increasing disconnection of left pre-PMd from the putative functional hierarchy, defined by reduced functional connectivity between left pre-PMd and adjacent nodes. These findings support the theory that activity within lateral frontal cortex shapes the search for relevant stimulus-response mappings, while emphasizing that the behavioral correlate of impairments depends critically on task structure.