A combined ERP and eletromyographic (EMG) investigation revealed that adolescents have attenuated contingent negative variation (CNV) activity during response preparation followed by larger P3b amplitude and EMG activity in the incorrect response hand during response execution.
Conversely young adults engaged increased response preparation followed by attenuated P3b activity and early EMG activity in the correct response hand during response execution which indicates a proactive control strategy.
In spite of the fact that the response cues used in Experiment 1 only provided partial information about either effector or movement direction for a subsequent reaching movement, ADAN and LDAP components were found to be reliably present during covert response preparation elicited by both types of cues.
Despite a strong association between ADHD, in both children and adults, and response preparation, as indexed by the CNV [ 20, 25, 28, 32], we did not find significant evidence for shared familial influences between this process and ADHD.
These flatmaps show that the task was associated with largely overlapping activity in visual, frontal, and parietal areas as demonstrated before for object and spatial memory tasks [Munk et al., 2002], reflecting the fact the stimuli were physically identical and many task components (visual processing, attention, executive control, response preparation) were shared by all conditions.
Such late activity has been reported in studies of picture naming, although this may have been confounded by response preparation with reaction times to picture confrontation in younger subjects at ∼500 ms (Levelt et al., 1998).
The automaticity of processing notwithstanding, Skarratt et al. (2014) recently raised the possibility that the processing advantage enjoyed by looming motion is mediated not so much by attentional mechanisms as by postattentional, response preparation processes.
In particular, adults showed relatively greater VS signal ostensibly linked to incentive cue presentation (anticipation), but adolescents later showed greater activation ostensibly elicited by oculomotor response preparation.
We hypothesize that the increased activation we observed in putative FEF may reflect an increase in fixation-related neuronal activity that then contributes to the improvements in adolescent performance (correct response rates) by enhancing response preparation.
