Developing Inhibitory Control

项目摘要 儿童在抑制不适当的行为、想法和情绪方面表现出明显的局限性。他们抑制控制的逐渐发展在当下至关重要，允许孩子延迟满足，灵活行事而不是遵循习惯，并调节他们的情绪，从长远来看，预测广泛的重要生活结果，包括健康，学业成就和收入。抑制控制的缺陷与许多临床疾病有关，包括ADHD、自闭症、强迫症和精神分裂症。因此，研究抑制控制的发展是一个机会，因为儿童长期的局限性和成功为了解对心理健康至关重要的基本过程提供了一个窗口。研究抑制控制的发展也是一个挑战，因为有针对性的干预努力，以提高儿童的抑制控制已经取得了有限的成功。一些广泛的干预努力已显示出希望，但涉及多个方面，时间密集，因此难以确定哪些组成部分是至关重要的，以便为有针对性的干预和理论发展提供信息。 最近的两项进展指出了一条有希望的前进道路。第一个进展是对成年人成功抑制控制的核心组成部分的新理解：主动监测环境信号的能力，这些信号表明应该停止行动。这一进展表明，抑制性限制，发展和干预措施可能严重依赖于积极主动的监测过程。第二个进步是对执行功能时间动态发展变化的新理解：儿童逐渐从执行功能的反应形式（仅在需要时参与控制过程）过渡到主动形式（参与控制过程并在未来需要时保持它们）。总之，这两项进展表明，儿童与抑制性控制的斗争反映了他们长期发展的主动控制（最终支持主动监测，这是抑制性控制的关键），以及他们早期使用的反应性控制（这是抑制性控制的效率较低）。必须相应地设计干预措施。这个建议建立在我们的工作开发这个框架的组成部分，并将它们整合起来，以测试一个统一的框架，了解抑制控制和有效干预的发展。这些研究测试了严重依赖反应性控制的幼儿和具有一定主动控制能力的大龄儿童，并纵向跟踪儿童通过关键过渡窗口的进展。我们将这些行为研究与计算模型紧密结合。我们的基础神经网络模拟展示了主动监控如何通过学习来发展，以支持抑制控制。我们提出的模型将有助于区分替代理论，并产生可检验的预测，以促进对支持抑制控制和有效干预发展的机制的理解。

Project Summary Children show remarkable limitations in their ability to suppress inappropriate actions, thoughts, and emotions. Their gradual development of inhibitory control is critical in the moment, allowing children to delay gratification, behave flexibly rather than following habits, and regulate their emotions, and in the longer term, predicting a wide range of important life outcomes, including health, academic achievement, and income. Deficits in inhibitory control are implicated in numerous clinical disorders, including ADHD, autism, OCD, and schizophrenia. Studying the development of inhibitory control thus represents an opportunity, because children's protracted limitations and successes provide a window into fundamental processes that are crucial for mental health. Studying the development of inhibitory control also represents a challenge, because targeted intervention efforts to improve children's inhibitory control have met with limited success. Some broad intervention efforts have shown promise but are multifaceted and time-intensive, making it difficult to identify which components are critical in order to inform targeted interventions and theory development. Two recent advances point to a promising way forward. The first advance is a new understanding of a core component of successful inhibitory control in adults: the ability to proactively monitor the environment for signals that indicate that an action should be stopped. This advance suggests that inhibitory limitations, developments, and interventions may depend critically upon processes for proactive monitoring. The second advance is a new understanding of developmental changes in the temporal dynamics of executive function: children gradually transition from a reactive form of executive function (engaging control processes only as needed in the moment) to a proactive form (engaging control processes and maintaining them in anticipation of needing them in the future). Together, the two advances suggest that children's struggles with inhibitory control reflect their prolonged development of proactive control (which ultimately supports the proactive monitoring that is critical for inhibitory control), and their early use of reactive control (which is less efficient for inhibitory control). Interventions must be designed accordingly. This proposal builds on our work developing the components of this framework and integrating them, to test a unified framework for understanding the development of inhibitory control and effective interventions. The studies test young children who rely heavily on reactive control, and older children who have some capacity for proactive control, and tracks children longitudinally as they progress through a key transition window. We tightly integrate these behavioral studies with computational models. Our foundational neural network simulations show how proactive monitoring can develop through learning, to support inhibitory control. Our proposed models will help to distinguish alternative theories and generate testable predictions, to advance understanding of the mechanisms supporting developments in inhibitory control and effective intervention.