Adolescence as a Sensitive Period of Brain Development.
By Delia Fuhrmann, L. Knoll, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2015
1,006 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Most research on sensitive periods has focussed on early sensory, motor, and language development, but it has recently been suggested that adolescence might represent a second ‘window of opportunity’ in brain development. Here, we explore three candidate areas of development that are proposed to undergo sensitive periods in adolescence: memory, the effects of social stress, and drug use. We describe rodent studies, neuroimaging, and large-scale behavioural studies in humans that have yielded data that are consistent with heightened neuroplasticity in adolescence. Critically however, concrete evidence for sensitive periods in adolescence is mostly lacking. To provide conclusive evidence, experimental studies are needed that directly manipulate environmental input and compare effects in child, adolescent, and adult groups.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2517b7abbbd780b2078a8523e4f90df0eb35fc7
Citations in the corpus
- Neurodevelopment of the association cortices: Patterns, mechanisms, and implications for psychopathology (2021, neutral): “This temporal patterning of cortical plasticity underlies hypotheses that late childhood and adolescence represent a sensitive or critical period for refinement of association cortices and the functions that they subserve (Fuhrmann et al., 2015; Gabard-Durnam and McLaughlin, 2020; Larsen and Luna, 2”
- Sexual dimorphism in cortical theta rhythms relates to elevated internalizing symptoms during adolescence (2024, unknown): “…regions (Larsen et al., 2022; Thompson et al., 2001; van Wingen et al., 2011), involving increased environmentally driven neuroplastic changes (Fuhrmann et al., 2015) that confer increased susceptibility to environmental influence, heightening risk for deleterious alterations which…”