Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience最新文献

Time is a central dimension of episodic memory which allows us to remember not only what happened and where from past events, but also when those events occurred and how they relate to one another. Adults can form hierarchical knowledge derived from episodic experience that includes precise timing details about individual events and information about temporal patterns that encode regularities across experiences, alongside factual knowledge about time (e.g., the months of the year). Young children's temporal memory is more constrained, lacking both the level of local detail and limited global knowledge relative to adult temporal representation. Despite behavioral evidence for such developmental differences in temporal memory, we lack a unified model that explains how local and global temporal representation abilities emerge, interact, and are organized across development. Here, we propose a three-stage neurocognitive framework for the hierarchical development of temporal memory, resulting from increasing representational capacity across the hippocampal-frontoparietal memory system. Reviewing behavioral and neuroimaging evidence, we propose that: 1) young children's temporal memory is initially local and event-specific due to functional immaturity of hippocampus; 2) older children and adolescents form and reinstate global knowledge of temporal regularities resulting from enhanced interactions between hippocampus and lateral frontoparietal cortex; and 3) adults flexibly deploy hierarchical knowledge of local details and generalities in new environments mediated by hippocampus and medial frontoparietal cortex interactions. This framework thus provides a unified, empirically-grounded model of temporal memory development, supporting increasingly complex temporal representations that enable adaptive behaviors at a variety of temporal resolutions.

Abnormal functional brain development associated with preterm birth has been widely reported; however, the functional brain architectures of later neurodevelopmental difficulties are not yet fully understood. Here, we applied connectome-based predictive modeling approaches to identify the brain networks associated with later neurocognitive scores at 2-3 years of age in very preterm infants (≤31 weeks' gestation, N = 79) using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). The whole-brain functional connectome soon after birth successfully predicted verbal ability at 3 years of corrected age (r = 0.53, p=4.04x10^-7) and motor ability at age 2 (r = 0.39, p=0.0004) in very preterm infants. In particular, we found that functional edges between the frontoparietal network and limbic, motor, and medial frontal networks at birth contributed significantly to the prediction of future verbal language ability, while the edges connecting the medial frontal network and motor and basal ganglia networks contributed the most to the prediction of future motor ability. In a separate validation analysis, we demonstrated that the mean connectivity strength among these top brain networks significantly differentiated (average accuracy 76%, p < 0.001) poor from normal performers at 2 and 3 years of age. These findings highlight regional functional connectivity soon after birth as a promising biomarker for identifying risks for later brain disorders, which could inform the targeted development of effective early treatments and interventions.

In childhood and adolescence, functional brain networks go through different stages of development, and the levels of connectivity within and between these networks change with age. The developmental trajectory of these large-scale networks of the brain has been extensively investigated; however, many aspects of our social brain and its developmental patterns remain unclear. This study employed a cross-sectional design to investigate the brains of 753 children and adolescents (ages 5-15) while they watched a movie. This research investigates the functional distinctness and developmental synchronicity of brain areas implicated in social cognition, such as empathy and affective and cognitive theory of mind, across childhood and adolescence using generalized additive models and inter-region group analysis. Our findings suggest that social cognition components networks such as cognitive and affective theory of mind and empathy exhibit distinct developmental trajectories throughout childhood and adolescence. The findings support the theory that social cognitive networks are developmentally distinct from each other, even in the absence of task-specific paradigms.