Self-control matures later than working memory in adolescence, large analysis finds

Adolescence, the developmental phase between childhood and adulthood, is marked by substantial mental, emotional and social changes. Past psychological studies suggest that during this stage, humans gradually acquire greater control over their thoughts and actions, learn to better regulate their emotions and further develop their social skills.

While many changes that commonly occur during adolescence are well-documented, large-scale, population-based reference ranges showing how young people typically perform on specific mental tasks at different ages remain limited. These reference ranges could potentially help researchers identify deviations associated with a greater vulnerability to mental health or behavioral difficulties.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, the Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Tsinghua University and other institutes recently analyzed data collected from more than 33,000 Chinese adolescents. Their analyses, summarized in a paper published in Nature Mental Health, allowed them to map age-related differences in two key mental abilities: inhibitory control and working memory.

“Adolescence represents a sensitive window for the maturation of executive function (EF), a core neurocognitive system underlying adaptive emotion regulation and social behavior,” wrote Yang Li, Lirou Tan and their colleagues in their paper.

“However, large-scale normative benchmarks of EF development and the extent to which deviations from these norms signal mental health vulnerability remain unclear. Using data from Chinese adolescents aged 11–18 years, we mapped normative developmental trajectories of inhibitory control and working memory.”

Mapping two crucial mental skills throughout adolescence

The researchers analyzed data collected from 33,622 Chinese adolescents between the ages of 11 and 18 as part of an ongoing project called A-HELP (Adolescent Health Enhancing Long-term Plan). They specifically compared the performance of adolescents of different ages on tests of inhibitory control and working memory.

Inhibitory control is the human ability to stop or suppress an automatic, impulsive or inappropriate response. For instance, it could entail not interrupting someone while they are speaking, ignoring phone notifications while studying or pausing before responding angrily to a parent or guardian.

Working memory, on the other hand, is the ability to temporarily store and use information while completing a task, sometimes mentally manipulating it in response to changes in the current situation. For example, working memory allows people to remember sequences of instructions, perform calculations mentally or keep track of the ingredients already added to a dish while following a recipe.

In the context of the team’s study, inhibitory control was measured using a simple test called the Go/No-Go task. During this test, the young participants were shown a series of stimuli and had to respond rapidly to some frequent “Go” stimuli while refraining from responding to less frequent “No-Go” stimuli.

The adolescents’ working memory was instead measured using so-called 1-back and 2-back tasks. Participants were shown a sequence of stimuli and asked to identify when a stimulus matched the one immediately before it in the 1-back task or the stimulus presented two trials earlier in the 2-back task.

Improving the understanding of tween and teenage development

The results of the team’s analyses suggest that inhibitory control continued developing into late adolescence, whereas working memory performance reached a plateau earlier. In other words, average working memory performance plateaued at an earlier age than inhibitory control performance. Moreover, differences in performance among adolescents of the same age were smaller at older ages.

“Inhibitory control matured into late adolescence, whereas working memory plateaued earlier, accompanied by declining interindividual variability,” wrote the authors. “Greater deviations below age-normed EF performance were associated with elevated peer and conduct problems, higher hyperactivity/inattention and reduced prosocial behavior, with these patterns being most pronounced during early adolescence and gradually attenuating thereafter.”

To assess the robustness and broader applicability of their findings, the researchers also analyzed existing data collected from 11,549 adolescents participating in the U.S. Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. This allowed them to investigate whether comparable patterns of executive-function development and associations with mental health were observed in adolescents from another country.

“Replication in 11,549 US adolescents yielded convergent results,” wrote Li, Tan and their colleagues. “Together, these findings provide population-based benchmarks of EF development and highlight sensitive periods when neurocognitive deviations are most predictive of emerging psychopathology, informing identification and timing-specific prevention strategies.”

In the future, the results of this study could help improve existing models of adolescent development. They could also inform the development of age-appropriate mental health prevention or support programs.

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Ingrid Fadelli

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