The Many Routes to Neurocognitive Maturation

• In Event: 3-132 - Cognitive Control in Childhood and Adolescence: Tracking Neural Development and Testing Novel Interventions

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Cognitive control, the ability to generate planned goal-directed responses versus reactive, goal-incompatible responses, is significantly enhanced through childhood into adolescence, when adult level responses are evident. This cognitive development proceeds in parallel with important changes in how the brain processes information and the engagement of network dynamics that support reliable and precise responses. However, the extent to which individual, subject-specific trajectories vary in normative neurocognitive development is not well understood, undermining our ability to chart healthy development and detect impairments such as in mental illness.

Hypotheses: Given past evidence that cognitive control and its underlying executive brain systems undergo significant changes through childhood, with an adolescent transition to stabilization into adulthood, we hypothesized that the developmental trajectories of both cognitive control and resting state network connectivity would reflect an inverse function and they would differ across subjects in the timing of growth and stabilization.

Study Population: Resting state fMRI data and behavioral assessments of cognitive control were obtained from four study cohorts or normative subjects including: three independent longitudinal data sets from the Luna lab and the cross-sectional dataset from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) for a total of 938 subjects and 1642 scans spanning 8-32 years of age.

Methods: 5-8 minutes of resting state data were obtained from the different cohorts. Resting-state time courses were extracted from cortical (Gordon et al., 2014) and subcortical (Harvard-Oxford) regions of interest (ROIs) General additive mixed models (GAMM) were used to estimate flexible, semi-parametric trajectories of resting-state connectivity for every pairwise connection, while also controlling for gender and a non-linear effect of head motion. Composite scores for domain general cognitive control were estimated from the shared variance among the battery of cognitive assessments characterizing: inhibitory control, working memory, task switching, and planning behavior.

Results: Initial results show that the majority of connectivity between ROIs across the brain increases in an inverse function with age (Figure 1), occurring predominantly between and not within networks. Trajectories differed by time of dynamic growth and stabilization. Similarly, cognitive control improved with age throughout adolescence following an inverse function (Figure 2). Earlier maturation of network connectivity was associated with later or lower cognitive maturation. Differences in trajectories did not appear to be related to sex or IQ but reflect unique patterns of development.

Conclusions: Foundational aspects of brain network architectures are established by childhood providing a platform for specialization through adolescence. Cognitive maturation involves periods of dynamic growth spurts through adolescence followed by stabilization that differ as to when they occur and may determine the level of cognitive control established in adulthood. Understanding the range of normative neurocognitive trajectories can inform the ability to discern impaired trajectories such as in psychopathology.

Authors

• Beatriz Luna, University of Pittsburgh, Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development, The Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
  Presenting Author

• Finnegan Calabro, University of Pittsburgh, Departments of Psychiatry, Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development, The Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
  Non-Presenting Author

• Brenden Tervo-Clemmens, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author