Inhibitory control, the ability to suppress irrelevant thoughts or actions, is central to cognitive and social development. Protracted maturation of frontal brain networks has been reported as a major restraint for this ability, yet, young children, when motivated, successfully inhibit delayed responses. A better understanding of the age-dependent neural inhibitory mechanism operating during the awaiting-to-respond window in children may elucidate this conundrum. We recorded ERPs from children and parental adults to a visual-spatial working memory task with delayed responses. Cortical activation elicited during the first 1000 ms of the awaiting-to-respond window showed, as predicted by prior studies, early inhibitory effects in prefrontal ERPs (P200, 160–260 ms) associated with top-down attentional-biasing, and later effects in parietal/occipital ERPs (P300, 270–650 ms) associated with selective inhibition of task-irrelevant stimuli/responses and recurrent memory retrieval. Children successfully inhibited delayed responses and performed with a high level of accuracy (often over 90%), although, the prefrontal P200 displayed reduced amplitude and uniformly delayed peak latency, suggesting low efficacy of top-down attentional-biasing. P300, however, with no significant age-contrasts in latency was markedly elevated in children over the occipital/inferior parietal regions, with effects stronger in younger children. These results provide developmental evidence supporting the sensorimotor recruitment model of visual-spatial working memory relying on the occipital/parietal regions of the early maturing dorsal-visual network. The evidence is in line with the concept of age-dependent variability in the recruitment of cognitive inhibitory networks, complementing the former predominant focus on frontal lobes.

抑制性控制，即抑制无关思想或行为的能力，是认知和社会发展的核心。据报道，大脑额叶网络的长期成熟是这种能力的主要限制因素，然而，当有动机时，幼儿成功地抑制了延迟反应。更好地理解在儿童等待响应窗口期间运行的年龄依赖性神经抑制机制可能会阐明这个难题。我们将儿童和父母成人的 ERP 记录到具有延迟反应的视觉空间工作记忆任务中。正如先前研究预测的那样，在等待响应窗口的前 1000 毫秒内引发的皮质激活显示出前额叶 ERP 的早期抑制作用（P200，160-260毫秒）与自上而下相关注意力偏置，并在以后的效果顶叶/枕骨的ERP（P300，与任务无关的刺激/响应和复发性存储器检索选择性抑制相关270-650毫秒）。儿童成功地抑制了延迟反应并以高水平的准确度（通常超过 90%）进行了表演，尽管前额叶 P200 显示出降低的幅度和一致延迟的峰值潜伏期，表明自上而下的注意力偏向的有效性较低。然而，P300 在潜伏期没有显着的年龄差异的情况下，在枕叶/下顶叶区域的儿童中显着升高，对年幼儿童的影响更大。这些结果提供了支持视觉空间工作记忆的感觉运动募集模型依赖于早期成熟的背视网络的枕骨/顶叶区域。证据与认知抑制网络招募中年龄依赖性可变性的概念一致，补充了以前对额叶的主要关注。