Intrinsic Activity Develops Along a Sensorimotor-Association Cortical Axis in Youth

Abstract

Animal studies of neurodevelopmental plasticity have shown that intrinsic brain activity evolves from high amplitude and globally synchronized to suppressed and sparse as plasticity declines and the cortex matures. Leveraging resting-state functional MRI data from 1033 individuals (8-23 years), we reveal that this stereotyped refinement of intrinsic activity occurs during human development and provides evidence for a cortical gradient of neurodevelopmental plasticity during childhood and adolescence. Specifically, we demonstrate that declines in the amplitude of intrinsic activity are initiated heterochronously across regions, coupled to the maturation of a plasticity-restricting structural feature, and temporally staggered along a hierarchical sensorimotor-association axis from ages 8 to 18. Youth from disadvantaged environments exhibit reduced intrinsic activity in regions further up the sensorimotor-association axis, suggestive of a reduced level of plasticity in late-maturing cortices. Our results uncover a hierarchical axis of neurodevelopment and offer insight into the temporal sequence of protracted neurodevelopmental plasticity in humans.

Personalized Functional Brain Network Topography Predicts Individual Differences in Youth Cognition

“…Indeed, these regions tend to exhibit lower structural and functional heritability 55,56 and undergo the greatest surface area expansion during development. 48 Moreover, the extended window of plasticity for these regions compared with other parts of the cortex 57 renders them more likely to be shaped by an individual’s environments and experiences, 56 potentially further contributing to their unique spatial patterning across individuals. Encouragingly, this extended window in which association networks remain plastic may also indicate that interventions targeting these systems could be effective in supporting the development of healthy cognition.…”

Individual Differences in Delay Discounting are Associated with Dorsal Prefrontal Cortex Connectivity in Youth

“…Prior work suggests that adolescence is an important period for the general organization of large-scale FC, in which changes in connectivity adhere to a sensorimotor-association gradient that culminates in the DMN, a network clearly implicated in our analyses (Sydnor et al, 2022; Margulies et al, 2016). Further, the FC of the dPFC is known to evolve throughout adolescence with a shift from general to more differentiated abilities (Li et al, 2022).…”

Multilayer network associations between the exposome and childhood brain development

“…The exposome, defined as the totality of environmental exposures across the lifespan, was originally established to address the need for more comprehensive evaluation of environmental exposures in relation to epidemiological outcomes (Wild, 2012). Since then, psychiatry studies have investigated the exposome's role in relation to psychopathological outcomes using factor analysis, which reduces multiple exposures to a few factors (e.g., Barzilay et al, 2021;Guloksuz et al, 2018;Moore et al, 2022;Pries et al, 2022;Sydnor et al, 2023). However, this approach alone might not be able to fully capture the complexity of relationships between environmental exposures and outcomes of interest.…”