Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience最新文献

Violence affects over one billion children globally each year. Early adolescence is a sensitive period for neurobehavioral development, making it critical to understand how violence impacts the brain. While emotional, physical, and social outcomes related to violence have been extensively studied, the neurobiological mechanisms linking violence to developmental outcomes remain underexplored. This study investigated associations between violence and neural communication in 9-10 year olds from the longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development-Social Development Study (n = 2016). Regression analyses tested whether lifetime violence exposure (ages 9-10), recent exposure (ages 11-13), and cumulative exposures over three years were associated with connectivity between critical networks and subcortical regions. Findings revealed distinct types of violence were associated with alterations in brain connectivity across critical networks involved in emotional regulation, cognitive control, and threat detection. Internet victimization was consistently associated with alterations in neural communication, suggesting digital environments may uniquely influence neural pathways linked to self-reflection and emotional processing. Cumulative violence exposure was associated with greater increases in progression of neural communication between the default mode and salience networks and the salience network and hippocampus. These findings emphasize the need for tailored interventions addressing specific violence exposures, mitigating potential impacts on youth brain development and emotional health.

Adolescence is commonly claimed to be a 'sensitive period,' but it is not clear how experience at this age may have stronger impact than in adulthood. We hypothesized that enhanced sensitivity to experience during adolescence may manifest as stronger encoding of task-related information in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). To study neural activity in layer 2/3 of the developing mouse dmPFC, we used a microscope to image mice while they learned an auditory go/no-go task. We found adolescent mice (30-45 days old) learned the task to criterion faster than adult mice (60-75 days old). When we compared activity in expert mice with comparable performance between the two age groups, we found that a similar fraction of single cells encoded task variables. However, task information could be better decoded from the adolescent dmPFC population activity than the adult. Adolescents also showed greater noise correlation than adults and shuffling to remove this noise correlation suggested noise correlation contributed to gain of function in adolescent compared to adult brain. We suggest a working model for adolescent brain function in which greater noise correlation supports greater capacity for distributed encoding of information driving increased sensitivity to experiences at this stage of life.

This review synthesizes ten years of research utilizing data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, emphasizing how the study's comprehensive, longitudinal design supports a multivariate understanding of adolescent mental health. We focus on studies that have examined the collective or interacting relations of multiple factors to mental health in adolescents, as this unique dataset allows for examining more complex configurations of risk factors. We highlight key findings from ABCD data that have deepened our understanding of the risk factors shaping mental health outcomes in adolescence. Findings underscore the complex interplay of biological, psychological, and/or contextual factors on adolescent mental health. We conclude with a forward-looking discussion of emerging research priorities and opportunities to further leverage the ABCD dataset to inform developmental theory, prevention, and intervention efforts.

Curiosity scaffolds children's exploration and learning. Yet, the neural mechanisms of curiosity-modulated learning in children remain unclear. Here, we designed an fMRI task to test how curiosity, as defined by children's self-reported excitement about learning information, modulates memory and neural activity in 5- to 8-year-olds (n = 60 with behavioral data, n = 51 with fMRI). We observed greater learning when children reported more curiosity. In whole-brain analyses, high-curiosity was associated with greater activation in inferior frontal gyrus, lateral occipital cortex, the thalamus, and the putamen. Curiosity did not modulate activation in preregistered regions of interest (dorsal attention network, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens) but did modulate activation in an exploratory region of interest, the amygdala. Multivariate searchlight decoding revealed local activity patterns that reliably distinguished reported curiosity levels in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, angular gyrus, precuneus, and cerebellum. Together, these findings are consistent with prior work on curiosity-related activation during information receipt in adults, suggesting that neural systems that support curiosity-driven learning are already engaged in early childhood.