Lazzaro, Sair
(2018)
Development of cognitive flexibility in late adolescence: investigating behavioral performance and neural activation in a task-switching paradigm.
Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
Successful cognitive control relies on both the ability to instantiate higher-order cognitive functions and the ability to flexibly switch between them in service of changing task demands, i.e. cognitive flexibility. While a wealth of important work on the development of cognitive control in adolescence has focused on the development of executive functions, there has been a relative lack of work on the development of cognitive flexibility. Here we address this limitation by investigating the development of cognitive flexibility using a task-switching paradigm in a large sample of adolescents and young adults (ages 14-32, n = 82). For a subset of subjects that had usable fMRI data (n=56), we assessed task-switching performance and analyzed fMRI data collected in-scanner while they performed the task-switching paradigm. We observed that successful task-switching was associated with widespread activation of frontoparietal and visual processing brain areas. A component of this larger task-switching system, the left inferior parietal cortex, showed age-related reductions in neural activation specifically during task-switching into trials that taxed inhibitory control. These neural findings occurred in parallel with age-related improvements in successful task-switching performance in the same context. This pattern of results suggests that task-switching into the most cognitively demanding contexts follows a protracted development that extends through adolescence and young adulthood. Further, the age-related reduction in parietal cortex activation suggests that adolescents have greater reliance on the frontoparietal system, which has been implicated in transient aspects of cognitive control, to achieve adult-like performance. Taken together, our results suggest that a key aspect of cognitive maturation in adulthood is the ability to flexibly switch between cognitive tasks with limited cost to performance and a decreasing reliance on frontoparietal regions across adolescence.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
25 April 2018 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
16 April 2018 |
| Approval Date: |
25 April 2018 |
| Submission Date: |
19 April 2018 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
33 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
David C. Frederick Honors College
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Psychology |
| Degree: |
BPhil - Bachelor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Undergraduate Thesis |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
development, cognitive development, task-switching, adolescence |
| Date Deposited: |
25 Apr 2018 17:31 |
| Last Modified: |
17 Jul 2023 16:02 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/34344 |
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