ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2020
External rewards and positive stimuli promote different cognitive control engagement strategies in children.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Adaptive habits: understanding executive function and its development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- People are sensitive to environmental predictability when engaging cognitive control.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- How Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation Impact Cognitive Flexibility in Children With Autism.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- Effect of cognitive control strategies on young children's attention and emotion during coding learning.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Characterizing age-related change in learning the value of cognitive effort.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- The effects of an unfamiliar experimenter on proactive and reactive control in children.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Why doesn't executive function training improve academic achievement? Rethinking individual differences, relevance, and engagement from a contextual framework.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2023Article
- Peak selection and latency jitter correction in developmental event-related potentials.Developmental psychobiology · 2021Article
- Revisiting positive affect and reward influences on cognitive control.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2021Article
- Adaptiveness in proactive control engagement in children and adults.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In everyday life, children often need to engage control in emotionally or motivationally relevant contexts. This study disentangled and directly compared the respective influences of external rewards and positive stimuli on childhood cognitive control. We expected external rewards to promote proactive cognitive control and positive stimuli to impair proactive control, especially in younger age. EEG data were recorded while children (5-6 years old and 9-10 years old) and adults completed a cued task-switching paradigm in three conditions: positive-stimulus, external-reward and control conditions. Provision of reward resulted in more accurate but slower responses, and more pronounced cue-locked posterior positivity, potentially suggesting general proactive mobilisation of attention (i.e., readiness). Despite no effects on behaviour, the presentation of positive stimuli was unexpectedly associated with a greater cue-locked extended slow-wave when task cues were presented ahead of targets (i.e. proactive-control possible) in younger children, suggesting greater proactive cue preparation. In contrast to our hypothesis, both external rewards and positive stimuli seem to promote different types of proactive approaches in children.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.