Does the Stroop task in young children require the prefrontal activation?: a NIRS study

We examined whether children recruit the prefrontal regions during the Shape Stroop task, which is regardedan age-appropriate assessment of inhibitory control. This task consisted of an identification session, wherechildren were asked to point to a small- and big-sized stimuli, and a Stroop session, where children were asked topoint to the small-sized stimuli with inhibition of pointing to the big-sized stimuli. We found that (1) childrenshowed marginally worse performances during the Stroop phase than the identification phase at the behaviorallevel (n=20, M age=35.05 months, SD=5.58), and (2) there was no significant differences in prefrontal regionactivation between the identification and the Stroop phases at the neural level (n=17, M age=34.53 months,SD=5.84). Our results suggested that the measurements obtained in the Shape Stroop task can vary from thoseobtained in the Stroop task.