Interhemispheric interaction during childhood: I. Neurologically intact children.
This study examined the development of interaction between the hemispheres as a function of computational complexity (Banich & Belger, 1990; Belger & Banich, 1992) in 24 children aged 6.5 to 14 years. Participants performed 2 tasks: a less complex physical-identity task and a more complex name-identity task. Children, like adults, exhibit an across-hemisphere advantage on the computationally more complex name-identity task, and neither a within-nor an across-hemisphere advantage for the computationally less complex physical-identity task. Correlations indicated that the younger the child, (a) the greater the size of the within-hemisphere advantage on the less complex task, (b) the greater the size of the across-hemisphere advantage on the more complex task, and (c) the poorer the ability to ignore attentionally distracting information in a selective attention paradigm. These results suggest that interhemispheric interaction in children, like that in adults, serves to deal with the heightened processing demands imposed by increased computational complexity.
Banich
M T
MT
Beckman Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. mbanich@psych.colorado.edu
Passarotti
A M
AM
Janes
D
D
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology; D003337:Corpus Callosum / Q000502:physiology*; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012016:Reference Values