Response inhibition in adults and teenagers: Spatiotemporal differences in the prefrontal cortex

Inhibition is a core executive function reliant on the frontal lobes that shows protracted maturation through to adulthood. We investigated the spatiotemporal characteristics of response inhibition during a visual go/no-go task in 14 teenagers and 14 adults using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and a contrast between two no-go experimental conditions designed to eliminate a common confound in earlier studies comparing go with no-go trials. Source analyses were performed using an event-related beamformer algorithm with co-registered individual structural MRIs. Performance was controlled to be similar across subjects. Analyses of MEG data revealed bilateral prefrontal activity in the inhibitory condition for both age groups, but with different spatiotemporal patterns: around 300 ms after stimulus onset in middle frontal gyri in teenagers vs. around 260 ms in inferior frontal gyri in adults. Moreover, the inhibition of a prepotent motor response showed a stronger recruitment of the left hemisphere in teenagers than in adults and of the right hemisphere in adults than in teenagers. These findings provide high-resolution temporal and spatial information regarding response inhibition in adolescents compared to adults, independent of motor components and performance differences.

► Used MEG to investigate spatiotemporal characteristics of response inhibition.
► Used a novel visual go/no-go paradigm in a group of teenagers and adults.
► Adults showed right then left inferior frontal gyri activation at 230–260 ms.
► Teenagers showed bilateral middle frontal gyri activation maximal at 320–350 ms.
► Teenagers showed more left dominance while adults showed more right.