Schedule of Events | Symposia

Speeding up cognitive development: metacontrol instructions foster adult-like event segmentation in adolescents

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Xianzhen Zhou¹ (xianzhen.zhou@ukdd.de), Foroogh Ghorbani¹, Astrid Prochnow¹, Christian Beste^1,2,3; ¹TU Dresden, Germany, ²German Center for Child and Adolescent Health (DZKJ), Germany, ³Shandong Normal University, China

Event segmentation, which involves dividing continuous information into meaningful units, changes as children develop into adolescents. Adolescents tend to segment events more coarsely than adults. This study explored whether metacontrol-related instructions could encourage adolescents to segment events more like adults. We compared event segmentation in two adolescent groups and one adult group, while simultaneously recording EEG data. One adolescent group was instructed to perform segmentation as finely as possible, whereas the other adolescent group and adults received no specific instructions on segmentation granularity. EEG data were analyzed using multivariate pattern analysis and source reconstruction. The findings revealed that adolescents given fine-grained instructions adjusted their segmentation probability closer to adult levels, although they did not fully match adults in processing multiple simultaneous changes. Neurophysiological results showed that adolescents with fine-grained instructions exhibited neural patterns more similar to adults. Increased activity in the inferior frontal gyrus in these adolescents compared to adults related to this. The results suggest that adolescents with fine-grained instructions demonstrated more persistent cognitive control and enhanced top-down attention compared to their peers and adults. The study shows that cognitive processes in adolescents can be shifted toward adult-like performance through instructions.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Development & aging