The consistency of control engagement in developmental populations

Control regions of the brain flexibly respond to changing task demands and support cognitive abilities that are important for learning and academic success. Deficits in task control brain function have been implicated in developmental learning disorders of reading and attention, which often present with overlapping behavioral characteristics. This dissertation presents three studies that use a multi-task approach to explore associations between academic or behavioral skills and control brain function in children with and without learning difficulties. Study 1 investigated task control activation across lexical and non-lexical tasks in a sample of 3rd-5th grade struggling readers. We found altered control engagement in struggling readers during a reading task, but not during a non-lexical task, suggesting that altered engagement of control in struggling readers is specific to the reading process rather than a reflection of a global control deficit. Study 2 investigated consistencies across different tasks in control brain activation when children made mistakes relative to when they responded correctly. We found that the majority of adult-derived brain regions important during errors also showed consistent engagement in children across three tasks, except in bilateral frontal areas, which may be regions that distinguish mature from immature error processing. Study 3 assessed brain activation during and after errors on two tasks in children with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We found that children engaged primarily cingulo-opercular and parietal task control regions during error trials, but both cingulo-opercular and fronto-parietal control regions during the trials after an error. During error processing, we found activation differences between children with and without ADHD in default, sensorimotor, and visual systems, and regions within these systems showed task-specific differences. Examining the consistency of control activation across tasks provides insight into domain-general or task-specific neural mechanisms that have the potential to be markers of difficulty, or targets for intervention, in children with learning or attention disorders.Psycholog