The effects of inhibitory control training for preschoolers on reasoning ability and neural activity

Qian Liu, Xinyi Zhu, Albert Ziegler, Shi Jiannong

    Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

    81 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Inhibitory control (including response inhibition and interference control) develops rapidly during the preschool period and is important for early cognitive development. This study aimed to determine the training and transfer effects on response inhibition in young children. Children in the training group (N = 20; 12 boys, mean age 4.87 ± 0.26 years) played “Fruit Ninja” on a tablet computer for 15 min/day, 4 days/week, for 3 weeks. Children in the active control group (N = 20; 10 boys, mean age 4.88 ± 0.20 years) played a coloring game on a tablet computer for 10 min/day, 1–2 days/week, for 3 weeks. Several cognitive tasks (involving inhibitory control, working memory, and fluid intelligence) were used to evaluate the transfer effects, and electroencephalography (EEG) was performed during a go/no-go task. Progress on the trained game was significant, while performance on a reasoning task (Raven’s Progressive Matrices) revealed a trend-level improvement from pre- to post-test. EEG indicated that the N2 effect of the go/no-go task was enhanced after training for girls. This study is the first to show that pure response inhibition training can potentially improve reasoning ability. Furthermore, gender differences in the training-induced changes in neural activity were found in preschoolers.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number14200
    JournalScientific Reports
    Volume5
    ISSN2045-2322
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2015

    Keywords

    • inhibition control
    • cognitive training
    • N2
    • Go/No-Go
    • preschoolers

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