Interhemispheric interaction during childhood: I. Neurologically intact children

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-ident ity 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 phy sical-identity task. Correlations indicated that the younger the child, (a) the greater the size of the within-hemisphere advantage on the less comple x 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 d istracting information in a selective attention paradigm These results sugg est that interhemispheric interaction in children, like that in adults, ser ves to deal with the heightened processing demands imposed by increased com putational complexity.