Biology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2749
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Item Developmental Parsing and Cognitive Control(2022) Ovans, Zoe; Huang, Yi Ting; Novick, Jared; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Processing sentences incrementally entails making commitments to structure (and sometimes role assignments) before all information in a sentence is present. Children in particular have been shown to have difficulty revising the initial structural commitments they make when these turn out to be incorrect (Trueswell et al., 1999; Hurewitz et al., 2000; Weighall, 2008; Choi & Trueswell, 2010; Anderson et al., 2011). While prior research has generally ascribed this to limitations in the development of children’s non-linguistic cognitive-control system, a precise account of how cognitive control limitations might lead to difficulty with incremental sentence processing is missing from the literature. In part, this is because existing research has focused on individual differences in children’s ability to exert cognitive control over their thoughts and actions. In contrast, this dissertation makes use of within-child variation in cognitive-control engagement to provide evidence that children’s domain-general cognitive-control system pushes them to rely more heavily on reliable parsing cues (and less heavily on unreliable ones) when the system is highly engaged. This conclusion brings together seemingly disparate results from child and adult conflict adaptation studies, where adults appear to adapt to conflict but children do not. Overall, it is concluded that cognitive-control engagement leads both children and adults to re-rank parsing cues to attend more to ones that are more task-relevant, but the criteria they use to determine which cues are most relevant can change with language experience.Item Development of Motivational Influences on Monitoring and Control Recruitment in the Context of Proactive and Reactive Control in Adolescent Males(2020) Bowers, Maureen; Fox, Nathan A; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Adolescence and the onset of puberty is a time period of physiological and behavioral changes that include a heightened reward sensitivity, but underdeveloped cognitive control. Cognitive control involves monitoring for salient stimuli and recruiting control to adapt behavior advantageously to reach a specific goal and is supported by the three domains of executive functioning (EF): inhibitory control, set-shifting, and working memory. Proactive control is engaged after an informative cue in preparation for an upcoming stimulus, while reactive control can be employed when preparation is not possible and you need to respond to a stimulus. Oscillations in the theta frequency (4-8Hz) during both cue presentation and stimulus presentation are implicated in proactive and reactive control processes. While reward has been shown to upregulate proactive control in adults, little work has assessed how reward influences theta oscillations during both proactive and reactive control throughout adolescence and pubertal development. Further, no work has sought to understand how EF abilities bolster reward-related changes in proactive or reactive control. Here, 68 adolescent males (Meanage=13.61, SDage=2.52) aged 9 – 17 years old completed a rewarded cued flanker paradigm while electroencephalogram (EEG) was collected. They also completed tasks from the NIH toolbox that tap the three EF domains. Behaviorally, reward hindered performance on proactive trials, particularly in mid-puberty, while enhancing performance on reactive trials. Reward was associated with increases in cue-locked theta power, but with overall reductions in cue-locked theta ICPS. Stim-locked theta power increased on reactive trials with increasing age, while stim-locked theta ICPS peaked in mid-adolescence for rewarded trials. Increased cue theta power was associated with worse performance on proactive trials. On proactive trials, adolescents with low levels of inhibitory control experience more reward-related interference, while reward-related interference was mitigated by better set-shifting abilities only in younger and older adolescents. In conclusion, reward differentially impacts proactive and reactive control throughout adolescent development and EF influences the impact of reward on proactive control throughout adolescence.