Observational studyScientific reports2019
Theta oscillations in 4-year-olds are sensitive to task engagement and task demands.
Observational study in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 49 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Utilizing functional neuroimaging to study early language development.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Review
- Theta activity as a marker of cognitive development in infancy: A longitudinal study across the first two years of life.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Wake EEG oscillation dynamics reflect both sleep pressure and brain maturation across childhood and adolescence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Electrophysiological correlates of inhibitory control in children: Relations with prenatal maternal risk factors and child psychopathology.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- Neural Markers of Attention at 6 Months Associate With Later Attentional Control Performance.Developmental science · 2025Article
- From Infancy to Childhood: A Comprehensive Review of Event- and Task-Related Brain Oscillations.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Theta activity and cognitive functioning: Integrating evidence from resting-state and task-related developmental electroencephalography (EEG) research.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Review
- The Synergy Zone: Connecting the Mind, Brain, and Heart for the Ideal Classroom Learning Environment.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Aberrant oscillatory activity in neurofibromatosis type 1: an EEG study of resting state and working memory.Journal of neurodevelopmental disorders · 2023Article
- Beyond Infant's Looking: The Neural Basis for Infant Prediction Errors.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Review
- EEG Dynamics of Error Processing and Associated Behavioral Adjustments in Preschool Children.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- How infant-directed actions enhance infants' attention, learning, and exploration: Evidence from EEG and computational modeling.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Social robots as effective language tutors for children: empirical evidence from neuroscience.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2023Article
- Habitual night waking associates with dynamics of waking cortical theta power in infancy.Developmental psychobiology · 2022Article
- Signal in the noise: Dimensions of predictability in the home auditory environment are associated with neurobehavioral measures of early infant sustained attention.Developmental psychobiology · 2022Article
- Assessing cognitive performance in dairy calves using a modified hole-board test.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Can EEG Correlates Predict Treatment Efficacy in Children with Overlapping ASD and SLI Symptoms: A Case Report.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Time-frequency analysis methods and their application in developmental EEG data.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Modulation of Theta Phase Synchrony during Syllable Processing as a Function of Interactive Acoustic Experience in Infancy.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Top-down control processes are essential for guiding attention and working memory towards task-relevant information. Recently, theta oscillations were suggested as critical for these cognitive processes. Infant studies testing a mixture of bottom-up and top-down processes support adult theta findings. Yet, since infants cannot be instructed, it remains unclear to what extent theta oscillations are involved particularly in top-down control in early childhood. That is especially relevant towards school age when children need top-down control to solve the increasingly complex tasks. In this EEG study, we investigated whether theta-power in 4-year-olds is sensitive to task engagement and to different cognitive task demands. In a within-subjects design, children had three different instructions before watching videos including either no demands (No Task), language-related (Color-naming Task), or action-related (Imitation Task) demands. We analyzed children's theta-power (3-6 Hz) in two contrasts: (1) Task vs. No Task and (2) Color-naming vs. Imitation Task. The findings revealed more frontomedial theta-power when children were engaged in a task and their frontomedial theta-power increased during their cognitive engagement. Theta-power was stronger over left fronto-temporal sites for language- compared to action-related demands. These findings support recent theoretical work highlighting theta oscillations in top-down control and extend this neurocognitive framework to preschoolers.
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