Development of relational reasoning during adolescence

Abstract

Non-linear changes in behaviour and in brain activity during adolescent development have been reported in a variety of cognitive tasks. These developmental changes are often interpreted as being a consequence of changes in brain structure, including non-linear changes in grey matter volumes, which occur during adolescence. However, very few studies have attempted to combine behavioural, functional and structural data. This multi-method approach is the one we took in the current study, which was designed to investigate developmental changes in behaviour and brain activity during relational reasoning, the simultaneous integration of multiple relations. We used a relational reasoning task known to recruit rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC), a region that undergoes substantial structural changes during adolescence. The task was administered to female participants in a behavioural (N=178, 7-27 years) and an fMRI study (N=37, 11-30 years). Non-linear changes in accuracy were observed, with poorer performance during mid-adolescence. fMRI and VBM results revealed a complex picture of linear and possibly non-linear changes with age.Performance and structural changes partly accounted for changes with age in RLPFC and medial superior frontal gyrus activity but not for a decrease in activation in the anterior insula/frontal operculum between midadolescence and adulthood. These functional changes might instead reflect the maturation of neurocognitive strategies.

Structural brain correlates of human sleep oscillations

“…Two concomitant high-resolution MPRAGE T1-weighted anatomical scans were obtained for each participant, each consisting of 176 sagittal slices (1 mm isotropic voxels) acquired with a repetition-time (TR) of 2300 ms and an echo-time (TE) of 2.52 ms. Individual estimates of grey matter volume, a stable trait-like measure previously demonstrated to offer sensitivity to inter-individual variability in brain morphology (Thompson et al, 2001), was calculated using the validated voxel-based morphometry approach (VBM) (Ashburner and Friston, 2000; Dumontheil et al, 2010; Mak et al, 2010; Ridgway et al, 2009). VBM analysis quantified the signal intensity of each voxel in the brain for a grey matter segmentation image, given the differential signal intensity yielded by magnetic resonance properties of grey and white matter, respectively.…”

Developmental Differences in the Control of Action Selection by Social Information

“…In previous studies, it is not clear whether this greater MPFC activation is due to adolescents "overmentalizing" in response to the same stimuli, or having to put in more work in terms of neural resources to achieve the same mentalizing computations or to lower signal-to-noise ratio associated with increased prefrontal gray matter volumes in adolescence compared with adulthood (see Blakemore, 2008). Recent work using other tasks suggests that decreases in brain activation during adolescence do not necessarily reflect concomitant gray matter volumes decreases (Dumontheil, Hassan, Gilbert, & Blakemore, 2010;Dumontheil, Houlton, Christoff, & Blakemore, 2010). The current study provides no evidence that adolescents use more neural effort to achieve the same mentalizing performance: In the absence of differences in performance, adolescents did not show greater activations than adults in Director Present 3-object trials, which require participants to take the directorʼs perspective into account.…”

Discounting and VBM

“…Synapses are known to be affected by many genes linked to psychiatric disorders, and some colleagues have already demonstrated that boys with conduct disorders may have more synapses [40,41]. Indeed the regions of the cortex which undergo the most pruning during adolescence are the ones we most associate with teenage behavior, e.g.…”