A superior ability to suppress fast inappropriate responses in children with Tourette syndrome is further improved by prospect of reward

Publication date: Available online 16 May 2019Source: NeuropsychologiaAuthor(s): Katrine Maigaard, Ayna Baladi Nejad, Kasper Winther Andersen, Damian Marc Herz, Julie Hagstrøm, Anne Katrine Pagsberg, Liselotte Skov, Hartwig Roman Siebner, Kerstin Jessica PlessenAbstractIn children with Tourette syndrome (TS), tics are often attributed to deficient self-control by health-care professionals, parents, and peers. In this behavioural study, we examined response inhibition in TS using a modified Simon task which probes the ability to solve the response conflict between a new non-spatial rule and a highly-overlearned spatial stimulus-response mapping rule. We applied a distributional analysis to the behavioural data, which grouped the trials according to the individual distribution of reaction times in four time bins. Distributional analyses enabled us to probe the children's ability to control fast, impulsive, responses, which corresponded to the trials in the fastest time bin. Additionally, we tested whether the ability to suppress inappropriate action tendencies can be improved further by the prospect of a reward. Forty-one clinically well-characterized medication-naïve children with TS, 20 children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and 43 typically developing children performed a Simon task during alternating epochs with and without a prospect of reward. We applied repeated measures ANCOVAs to estimate how the prospect of reward modulated reaction times and...
Source: Neuropsychologia - Category: Neurology Source Type: research