Metacontrol instructions lead to adult-like event segmentation in adolescents

Abstract

Event segmentation, which involves dividing continuous information into meaningful units, changes as children develop into adolescents. Adolescents tend to segment events more coarsely than adults. This study explores whether adolescents could adjust their segmentation style to resemble that of adults when provided with explicit metacontrol-related instructions. We compared event segmentation in two adolescent groups and one adult group, while simultaneously recording EEG data. One adolescent group was instructed to perform segmentation as finely as possible, whereas the other adolescent group and adults received no specific instructions on segmentation granularity. EEG data were analyzed using multivariate pattern analysis and source reconstruction. The findings revealed that adolescents given fine-grained instructions adjusted their segmentation probability closer to adult levels, although they did not fully match adults in processing multiple simultaneous changes. Neurophysiological results indicated that adolescents with fine-grained instructions exhibited neural decoding performance more similar to adults. Increased activity in the inferior frontal gyrus in these adolescents compared to adults related to this. The results suggest that adolescents with fine-grained instructions demonstrated more persistent cognitive control and enhanced top-down attention than their peers and adults. The study shows that adolescent cognitive processes can be shifted toward adult-like performance through instructions.