Hitting the target or striking out? Timed interception, inhibitory control, and mathematics attainment in adolescents

Previous research has shown that the ability to hit moving targets is associated with children’s attainment in mathematics. On the one hand, the link may result from the neural circuits that process spatiotemporal estimates being the very same that are recruited when performing mathematical operations. On the other, it may simply emerge from common control processes (most notably inhibitory control) which oversee the two. The present thesis aims to address this controversy. In the first experiment, adolescent data is combined with children’s data from the interceptive task used previously, and a measure of inhibition derived from the kinematics to show the link persists through adolescence and is independent from inhibitory control. Still, recent advances have shown inhibition can be broken down into reactive and proactive components, with the suggestion proactive control may represent the more useful measure in applied settings. The subsequent experiment seeks to develop and test a novel task capable of providing metrics of reactive and proactive inhibition in the context of interceptive actions. Finally, this is deployed with an adolescent population to interrogate the link with mathematics. In doing so, novel insights are gained into the mechanisms underlying proactive control and the developmental course of interceptive timing and inhibition. In future, the highly scalable assessment developed in this thesis may help characterize and identify cognitive deficiencies in adolescents that act as barriers to their health and academic success.