Interhemispheric Interaction During Childhood: I. Neurologically Intact Children

Abstract

This study examined the development of interaction between the hemispheres as a function of computational complexity (Banich & Belger, 1990; Belger & Banich, 1992) in 24 children aged 6.5 to 14 years. Participants performed 2 tasks: a less complex physical-identity task and a more complex name-identity task. Children, like adults, exhibit an across-hemisphere advantage on the computationally more complex name-identity task, and neither a within- nor an across-hemisphere advantage for the computationally less complex physical-identity task. Correlations indicated that the younger the child, (a) the greater the size of the within-hemisphere advantage on the less complex task, (b) the greater the size of the across-hemisphere advantage on the more complex task, and (c) the poorer the ability to ignore attentionally distracting information in a selective attention paradigm. These results suggest that interhemispheric interaction in children, like that in adults, serves to deal with the heightened processing demands imposed by increased computational complexity.