Response reversal and children with psychopathic tendencies: success is a function of salience of contingency change

BACKGROUND: Previous work has inconsistently reported difficulties with response reversal/extinction in children with psychopathic tendencies. METHOD: We tested the hypothesis that the degree of impairment seen in children with psychopathic tendencies is a function of the salience of contingency change. We investigated the performance of children with psychopathic tendencies on a novel probabilistic response reversal task involving four conditions with gradated reward-punishment contingencies (100-0, 90-10, 80-20 and 70-30; i.e., for the 100-0 contingency, responding to one object is always rewarded while responding to the other is always punished). RESULTS: In line with predictions, the impairment seen in the children with psychopathic tendencies was an inverse function of the salience of the contingency change. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that this data is consistent with suggestions of subtle orbital frontal cortex impairment in children with psychopathic tendencies.