Developmental changes in the feedback related negativity from 8 to 14 years
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2018.01.004
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Summary
This study investigates age-related developmental changes in the Feedback Related Negativity (FRN), an event-related potential component associated with feedback processing and executive function, in children aged 8 to 14 years. The research was motivated by conflicting prior findings on whether FRN amplitude decreases with age and the need to clarify the relationship between the FRN and specific executive control abilities, such as inhibitory control versus response maintenance. The authors hypothesized that treating age as a continuous variable would better capture developmental trends than categorical age groups. The experiment involved 106 children (mean age 11.0 years) who performed a modified Go/No-Go task requiring them to learn stimulus-response mappings through trial-and-error feedback. Two stimuli had valid feedback (consistent with performance), while two had invalid feedback (randomly positive or negative). Electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded using a 129-channel system and analyzed via spatio-temporal principal component analysis to isolate the FRN component, which peaked at approximately 350–380 ms post-feedback. Multilevel models were used to account for sibling dependencies in the data, examining FRN amplitude as a function of age, learning speed, and post-learning performance. Results indicated that while accuracy on valid Go trials improved with age, performance on valid No-Go trials remained stable across the age range. FRN amplitude was inversely related to age; older children exhibited smaller (more positive) FRN amplitudes even after controlling for learning speed. Furthermore, FRN amplitude predicted post-learning performance only in the Go condition, where smaller FRN amplitudes were associated with fewer errors, suggesting a link to executive abilities required for maintaining learned mappings. No such predictive relationship was found for No-Go trials, indicating that the FRN in this context does not strongly correlate with inhibitory control as measured by No-Go performance. These findings contribute to the understanding of how feedback processing matures during childhood. The inverse relationship between age and FRN amplitude supports the interpretation that younger children rely more heavily on external feedback, resulting in larger neural responses. The specific association between FRN and Go-trial performance suggests that the FRN reflects executive control processes related to information extraction and strategy maintenance rather than pure inhibition. This aligns with the "utility account" of the FRN, which posits that the component reflects the amount of processing resources allocated to feedback, with more efficient learners and those with better executive control exhibiting smaller amplitudes.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | author_sweep | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-28 |
| archive | success | manual_pmc_pow_fetch | — | — | 35 | 2026-08-22 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 4 | 2026-08-23 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| enrich | success | semantic_scholar | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-04 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.8-27b-gittensor | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-23 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
Summary generated by qwen3.8-27b-gittensor on 2026-08-23; verification: pending re-verification.
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