Study suggests attention networks promote changes in cortical organization and cognition during childhood

Neuroscience studies have consistently highlighted the profound changes that the human brain undergoes throughout childhood and adolescence. These efforts have uncovered different stages of development, during which the organization of the brain evolves to support increasingly complex cognitive functions, gradually shifting from a focus on somatosensory/motor and visual processing to more advanced mental abilities.

These stages of brain development and the neurobiological processes that underlie them have been extensively studied and are now relatively well understood. In contrast, the contributions of specific functional networks (i.e., interconnected brain regions that collectively perform specific functions) to the process of brain maturation remain poorly defined.

Researchers from Yale University, the National University of Singapore, and Beijing Normal University conducted a study to determine how individual functional networks contribute to brain maturation and the gradual acquisition of new cognitive abilities before adulthood.

Their conclusions, published in Neuroscience of Naturesuggest that one of the key functional networks responsible for directing attention to specific stimuli plays a role in brain reorganization and cognitive development during childhood and adolescence.

“The human brain undergoes functional changes during childhood and adolescence, shifting from an organizational framework anchored in sensorimotor and visual regions to one balanced by interactions with later-maturing aspects of the association cortex,” Hao-Ming Dong, Xi-Han Zhang, and colleagues wrote in their paper.

“We link this profile of functional reorganization to the development of ventral attention network connectivity across independent datasets.”

For their study, the researchers analyzed brain imaging data collected from children and adolescents throughout their development. Both datasets analyzed were collected as part of the Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP) and the ABCD Study, two separate longitudinal research efforts that collected brain scans and cognitive-related data from children and adolescents at regular intervals over a few years.

Analyzing these two data sets, the researchers first delineated the cortical regions that showed the most pronounced changes as the children in the CCNP and ABCD studies grew older. They observed that significant developmental changes occurred within a brain network related to attention, known as the ventral attention network (VAN).

The VAN is a functional network that allows humans to detect external, unexpected, and behaviorally relevant stimuli by redirecting their attention toward them. The team found that the changes observed in this network were correlated with cortical maturation and cognitive development in children.

“We demonstrate that maturational changes in cortical organization are preferentially linked to within-network connectivity and increased degree of centrality in the ventral attention network, while connectivity within network-related vertices predicts cognitive ability,” Dong, Zhang, and colleagues wrote.

“This connectivity is closely associated with the refinement of cortical organization during maturation. Children with low connectivity of the ventral attention network exhibit adolescent-like topographic profiles, suggesting that attentional systems may be relevant to understanding how brain functions are refined during development.”

Overall, the results collected by this research team suggest that functional networks specialized in attention, particularly the VAN, support brain reorganization and cognitive maturation throughout childhood and adolescence.

These results could pave the way for additional studies to further explore the contribution of VAN to neurodevelopment using other methods and longitudinal brain datasets.

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