br Conclusion In summary our study suggests

Conclusion In summary, our study suggests that activation in both the default network and fronto-parietal network during spatial working memory contributes to individual differences in behavioral performance even at a young age. In a group of youth 9–12 years of age, across participant differences in load-dependent deactivation in vACC and PCC significantly predicted better task performance while load-dependent activation in prefrontal and posterior parietal areas did not. In contrast, stronger coupling between prefrontal (IFJ) and PPC predicted better working memory performance across individuals, though coupling between default network regions did not. Furthermore, measures of executive function as early as age 3 were predictive of better spatial working memory performance and level of load-dependent deactivation in default network regions at the current age of 9–12 years. This suggests that there is a need to investigate the relationship between performance and default network deactivation at earlier ages. Our results have implications for psychopathologies with onsets in adolescence and early adulthood, such as schizophrenia, which is marked by spatial working memory deficits (Lett et al., 2014) and dysfunction in the default network (Whitfield-Gabrieli and Ford, 2012).
Conflict of interests
Acknowledgements We thank all participants and their parents who took part in this study. We also thank Laura Klein for project management and participant recruitment, and Anna Small, Ellen Kessel, Brandon Goldstein, Alyssa Lopez, Mayuri Ravi, Staci Weiss, Sean Ahluwalia, Irene Vogiatzis, and Colin O’Neil for their assistance when running participants. This work was funded by RO1 MH069942 (Klein) from the National Institutes of Health and the Stony Brook Research Foundation (Leung).
Introduction There are innumerable situations in life that can be interpreted in more than one way. People differ greatly with regard to the way they interpret such ambiguous situations. Consider the example of greeting a colleague when seeing him walking on campus, but the colleague does not respond to your greeting. To some people, this behaviour signals dislike or ignorance, whereas for others it wnt inhibitor simply indicates that he is deeply in his thoughts or even highly stressed. An “interpretation bias” is defined as an individual tendency to frequently classify ambiguous situations in a particular valenced direction, e.g. as threatening or pleasant. There is a reciprocal relationship between a person\'s schema about the self, world and future and an interpretation bias (Bartlett, 1932; Hertel et al., 2008; Tran et al., 2011; Field and Field, 2013). More specifically, on the one hand constantly interpreting ambiguous situations in a positive or negative way can form and strengthen such schema, but on the other hand a specific interpretive bias can be an expression of an existing schema. Leading cognitive psychotherapy techniques aim to modify negative biases by either challenging the validity of the negative interpretation and/or supporting the acquisition of a positive interpretation (Beck, 1976; Mathews and MacLeod, 2005; Holmes et al., 2009). The generalization of these learned interpretations to new situations is a key goal of cognitive therapy. Negative interpretation biases are already observable in adolescents suffering from anxiety disorders and such early emerging psychopathology can have long-term detrimental outcomes (Salemink and Wiers, 2011; Lau et al., 2012). Due to the high plasticity of the developing brain, it has been hypothesized that the chance to modify an existing interpretation bias is greater during early as compared to later developmental stages (Lau, 2013). However, empirical evidence for this is rather scarce. The interpretation of ambiguous situations essentially depends on our memory about previous outcomes of similar situations. Thus, strengthening the consolidation of such situations might change the interpretation of future situations. There is now extensive evidence supporting the idea that sleep and here mainly slow wave sleep (SWS, that is characterized by EEG activity at a frequency of 0.5–4Hz) strongly benefits the consolidation of newly acquired memories thereby enhancing performance at a later recall (Diekelmann and Born, 2010; Inostroza and Born, 2013). Besides the mere stabilization, sleep also contributes to the transformation of memories. More specifically, it has been argued that sleep-dependent memory consolidation results in the abstraction of a context-free, schema-like mental representation that enables the generalization of knowledge (Inostroza and Born, 2013; Lewis and Durrant, 2011). In a recent experiment, we demonstrated that sleep in children as compared to adults is more efficient in supporting the transformation of newly acquired memories. This superior ability was associated with the high amount of SWS in this age group and with hippocampal activation at memory recall (Wilhelm et al., 2013). The consolidation of memories during sleep can be improved by re-exposing context cues. More specifically, the re-exposure of an odour, words or tones that are associated with the newly learnt memories during sleep benefits later recall of these memories (Rasch et al., 2007; Rudoy et al., 2009; Schreiner and Rasch, 2014). The memory enhancing effect of cueing has been attributed to the facilitation of endogenous memory reactivations during SWS which is proposed to be an underlying mechanism of memory consolidation (Diekelmann and Born, 2010).