Neurodevelopment of the association cortices: Patterns, mechanisms, and implications for psychopathology

By Valerie J. Sydnor, Bart Larsen, D. Bassett, Aaron F. Alexander-Bloch, Damien A. Fair, Conor Liston, Allyson Mackey, Michael P. Milham, Adam R. Pines, David R. Roalf and 4 more. Neuron, 2021

618 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY The human brain undergoes a prolonged period of cortical development that spans multiple decades. During childhood and adolescence, cortical development progresses from lower order, primary and unimodal cortices with sensory and motor functions to higher order, transmodal association cortices subserving executive, socioemotional, and mentalizing functions. The spatiotemporal patterning of cortical maturation thus proceeds in a hierarchical manner, conforming to an evolutionarily rooted, sensorimotor-to-association axis of cortical organization. This developmental program has been characterized by data derived from multimodal human neuroimaging and is linked to the hierarchical unfolding of plasticity-related neurobiological events. Critically, this developmental program serves to enhance feature variation between lower order and higher order regions, thus endowing the brain’s association cortices with unique functional properties. However, accumulating evidence suggests that protracted plasticity within late-maturing association cortices, which represents a defining feature of the human developmental program, also confers risk for diverse developmental psychopathologies.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2bbcd76e7fe1795c042a266b67c3a12f6b860f6

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

neuromaps: structural and functional interpretation of brain maps (2022, background): “Second, given the growing interest in how these system-level maps or ‘gradients’ are related to one another, we sought to assess patterns of relationships among them 53,55 .”
The development of aperiodic neural activity in the human brain (2024, unknown): “However, contrary to dominant models of brain development based on structural measures 2,3,60 , we found that aperiodic activity in sensorimotor cortices does not stabilize until young adulthood.”
Developmental relationships between the human alpha rhythm and intrinsic neural timescales are dependent on neural hierarchy (2025, unknown): “In classic models of neural processing hierarchy, information is first processed in sensorimotor regions then in association regions (15,16), forming what has become known as the sensorimotor-to-association axis (S-A axis, reviewed in 17,18).”
Heterochronous laminar maturation in the human prefrontal cortex (2025, unknown): “In the high-resolution dataset, two peaks in the absolute second derivative were observed between cortical depths 3-4 and 11-12, uncovering data-driven boundaries between superficial, middle, and deep cortical compartments; the same peaks were observed whether R1 was averaged across the frontal…”
The development of aperiodic and periodic resting-state power between early childhood and adulthood: New insights from optically pumped magnetometers (2024, background): “…sensorimotor cortices maturing by early childhood, while the maturation of higher-order, association cortices is protracted, extending throughout adolescence (e.g., (Dong et al., 2021; Pines et al., 2022), see (Grayson and Fair, 2017; Norbom et al., 2021; Sydnor et al., 2021) for reviews).”
Sexual dimorphism in cortical theta rhythms relates to elevated internalizing symptoms during adolescence (2024, unknown): “…symptoms is more broadly consistent with recent trends, suggesting that shared symptoms across multiple neuropsychiatric diagnoses covary with widespread differences in the structure and function of these regions (Kaczkurkin, Park, et al., 2019; McTeague et al., 2017; Sydnor et al., 2021).”