Fig. 1

Behavior, cortico-basal ganglia pathways and pipeline. a Illustration of three cortico-basal ganglia pathways, including the hyperdirect pathway examined in the present study. The hyperdirect pathway is hypothesized to play a crucial role in rapid stopping. b Behavioral improvements in inhibitory action control ability measured using stop signal reaction time (SSRT) during childhood revealed by previous developmental studies. c Changes in stop signal reaction time (SSRT) from early to late childhood are much larger than between late childhood and adulthood. Panels (a) and (b) were generated using data from study 1 published by Schachar et al. ³² and study 2 by Williams et al. ³³. We grouped data from grade 4 and grade 6 in study 1 to match the late childhood group in study 2. d Overview of data analysis pipeline used in the current study. We first conducted meta-analyses to determine whether previous studies in children have yielded consistent findings as studies in adults. We then used three event-related fMRI datasets (Stanford_Child, OpenfMRI_Adult1, and OpenfMRI_Adult2) to investigate adult-like maturity of inhibitory action control during the stop signal task (SST). Our analyses focused on similarity of brain activation patterns between children and adults during the SST. We developed a neural maturity index (NMI) to quantify brain activation similarity between children and adults. We also investigated neural signatures of the hyperdirect pathway in children by examining the relationship between task-induced activation in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and SSRT and task-related cortical effective connectivity with the STN and SSRT