| Summary: | Adults and young children have been found to distinguish between moral and social conventional acts, which are considered to entail distinct domains of reasoning (e.g., Turiel 1983). Recently, research has begun to examine the neural basis of moral judgments (e.g., Greene et al., 2001), but these studies did not examine the development of neurocognitive processing of judgments in these two domains. The present study focused on detection of cognitive conflict as a neurocognitive process that distinguished judgments of moral and conventional violations. The N2 component of the ERP was examined in order to determine whether the two types of violation are associated with different neurophysiological correlates and whether they change with development. In a series of five experiments, reaction times and ERPs were recorded from 12- to 14-year-old children and undergraduates who read scenarios that had one of three possible endings: (1) moral violations, (2) conventional violations, (3) no violation (neutral acts). Participants judged whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable when a rule was assumed or removed. Results indicate that reaction times were faster for moral than conventional violations when a rule was assumed for both undergraduates and children, as well as when a rule was removed for children but not for undergraduates. ERP data indicated that adults’, but not children’s, N2 amplitudes were larger (i.e., more negative) for conventional than
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moral violations when a rule was assumed. Furthermore, source analysis indicated generators for the N2 in dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices. The results suggest that judgments of conventional violations involve increased conflict detection as compared to moral violations, and these two domains are processed differently across development. The findings were explained by the idea that judgments of conventional violations are more explicitly dependant on rules, whereas judgments of moral violations are based more directly on the intrinsic negative consequences of the act.
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