Title : Mapping brain responses to emotional stimuli: ERP investigation of children with reading difficulties during affectively modulated Go/No-Go
Abstract:
Having reading difficulties during early childhood significantly impacts both academic performance and daily functioning. Children with reading difficulties often struggle to perform well in school activities compared to their peers. In their daily lives, they encounter challenges in reading signs, menus, and other essential materials. There is a pressing need to better understand the underlying mechanisms of these difficulties. Executive functions, which encompass processes such as phonological and orthographic word identification, word meaning, and knowledge integration, plays a crucial role in reading. Understanding this could potentially serve as a predictor of reading difficulties. To explore brain-behavior relationships and understand differences between children with and without reading difficulties, this study utilizes Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural activity during a go/no-go task. Specifically, we focus on the N2, an Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) that is a negative wave peak at 200- 400ms post stimulus onset. This peak can be used to comprehend the nature and sequence of cognitive processes and is commonly used in go/no go tasks. It is commonly found in anterior and frontocentral sites. We presented an affectively modulated go/no-go task to assess children’s ability to inhibit responses in emotional and neutral conditions. Animal pictures were displayed on a screen one at a time. The child was instructed to act as zookeeper whose animals have escaped. They were to press a button as quickly as they could when they saw an animal to “capture” it and to avoid pressing the button when the animal picture showed a monkey. Two task blocks were employed: one with non-affectively charged pictures and another with affectively charged pictures. No-go trials in both blocks featured monkey pictures, while go trials displayed non-monkey images. The participants (N=52) had two groups, the typically developing group comprised of 32 children, while 20 children had reading difficulties. N2 peak amplitudes were extracted from the 200-400ms window post stimulus and paired T-tests were conducted. After conducting a paired t-test, significant results (t(51)=5.52, p<.05) were observed in conditions related to "go scary" emotional/neutral and "go non-scary" stimuli, indicating heightened brainwave amplitudes in response to the emotional pictures across both groups. Interestingly, no significant differences were found in the "go all" and "nogo all" conditions (t(51)=.61, p>.05) when doing a paired t-test, suggesting similar brainwave responses regardless of the need for inhibition. Comparison between the control and reading difficulties groups revealed higher amplitudes across conditions for the control group, consistent with existing literature showing differential neural responses in children with reading difficulties. These findings offer valuable insights into the distinct neural mechanisms associated with reading difficulties, informing future research directions and potential intervention strategies.
Audience Take Away Notes:
- Deepen understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying reading difficulties
- Conducting further research on the relationship between executive functioning and ERP to further differentiate between children with reading difficulties and typically developing peers
- Also, further research on targeted interventions aimed at improving outcomes for children with reading difficulties
