Children show less enhancement of the FRN for negative
compared with positive feedback, suggesting children
are poorer at differentiating between types of feedback
than adults (Hämmerer et al., 2010). The authors suggest
this may explain why learning is more disrupted in
children when feedback is probabilistic and difficult to
discriminate. FP amplitude decreases less across learning
in children than adults and ERP correlates of monitoring
errors in performance differentiate less between correct
and error responses in children than in adults (Eppinger
et al., 2009). Based on these differences between children
and adults, Eppinger et al. (2009) suggested that children
have weaker internal representations of whether a
response is correct or erroneous, resulting in a greater
reliance on feedback processing to achieve successful performance.
In a recent review of this literature, Hämmerer
and Eppinger (2012) proposed that increasing reinforcement
learning ability reflects developing efficiency in
processing feedback, using reinforcements effectively to
guide goal-directed behaviour, and building internal representations
of correct behaviours, as prefrontal cortical
regions mature.