Performance monitoring in children and adolescents: a review of developmental changes in the error-related negativity and brain maturation

Abstract

To realize our goals we continuously adapt our behavior according to internal or external feedback. Errors provide an important source for such feedback and elicit a scalp electrical potential referred to as the error-related negativity (ERN), which is a useful marker for studying typical and atypical development of cognitive control mechanisms involved in performance monitoring. In this review, we survey the available studies on age-related differences in the ERN in children and adolescents. The majority of the studies show that the ERN increases in strength throughout childhood and adolescence, suggesting continued maturation of the neural systems for performance monitoring, but there are still many unresolved questions. We further review recent research in adults that has provided important insights into the neural underpinnings of the ERN and performance monitoring, implicating distributed neural systems than include the dorsal anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, the lateral prefrontal cortex, insula, basal ganglia, thalamus and white matter connections between these regions. Finally, we discuss the possible roles of structural and functional maturation of these brain regions in the development of the ERN. Overall, we argue that future work should use multimodal approaches to give a better understanding of the neurocognitive development of performance monitoring.

Keywords: Cingulate; Development; Error processing; Event-related potentials; Multimodal imaging; Prefrontal cortex.